Indeed, Paul Ryans entire reputation rests upon these kinds of abstractions. His budgets imagine huge cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and Medicare and so on, but they have no binding force. His allure to the conservative movement as a vice presidential nominee was that hed be uniquely suited to turn these abstractions into reality.
Many close Congress watchers and indeed many Congressional Democrats have long suspected that their votes for Ryans budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts.
Todays Transportation/HUD failure confirms that suspicion. Partially at least. Republicans dont control government. But ahead of the deadline for funding it, their plan was to proceed as if the Ryan budget was binding, and pass spending bills to actualize it to stake out a bargaining position with the Senate at the right-most end of the possible.
But they cant do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budgets parameters, they doesnt come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass.Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you dont just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who wont vote for any appropriations bills unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly youre nowhere near 218 votes.
Yes, the House can pass things like the defense appropriations bill. But only because theyve plundered other programs to provide the Pentagon with consensus-level funding. But they cant fund most of the rest of the government without violating the Ryan budget.
With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted three months ago, said an angry appropriations chair Hal Rogers (R-KY). Thus I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts must be brought to an end.
