I know the budget process is pretty boring, but it’s ultimately the most important thing that happens in politics. The budget is where our priorities are set and our resources are allocated. The Budget Control Act of 2011 set the upper limit for congressional spending, so the Senate didn’t bother to pass a budget in 2011 or 2012. They didn’t need to pass one this year, either, expect Congress enacted a bill (probably unconstitutional, but still) that would have withheld pay to members of Congress if either house failed to pass a budget this year. So, the Senate got down to business and passed a budget. In the normal course of events, the Senate would appoint conferees who would sit down with House-appointed conferees, and they would hash out a compromise between Senate Patty Murray’s (D-WA) budget and Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget. This is called a conference committee, and it’s how bills from the House and Senate are reconciled so that they can have one bill with identical language that both chambers can pass. This process is called “regular order” because it crafts legislation in a committee that is open to the public, as opposed to making “back room deals” that are then presented as fait accomplis.
The Republicans, including Mitt Romney’s campaign, have been hammering the Senate Democrats for years now because they haven’t been using regular order to pass their budgets, or even passing any budgets at all. But, now that the Senate Democrats have passed a budget, and now that they are prepared to use regular order in a conference committee to reconcile their differences with the House, the House Republicans have cold feet.
House Republicans have no plans to appoint a conference committee to hammer out a budget deal with Senate Democrats, Rep. Paul Ryan said Tuesday, arguing that the move is pointless unless private talks bring the two sides closer to agreement.
“What we want to do is have constructive dialogues to find out where the common ground is and then go to conference when we have a realistic chance of actually coming out with an agreement,” said Ryan (R-Wis.), who chairs the House Budget Committee.
So, Paul Ryan doesn’t want transparency. He doesn’t want to have public votes. He wants to do a back room deal. After all that talk and drama about the Democrats’ dirty dealing, Rep. Ryan wants to make a dirty deal. Why the about-face?
Brian Beutler explains:
To explain the about-face, consider what happens if conferees begin meeting and negotiating right away. In this phase of regular order, leadership has less control over the course of events, and pretty much everything is majority rule. Democratic negotiators will be able to relitigate the fight they won in the election. They’ll agree to entitlement spending cuts; they might even reluctantly embrace a provision in President Obama’s budget — chained CPI — that would among other things slow the growth of Social Security benefits. But only if Republicans agreed to ditch the anti-tax absolutism.
Republicans would be faced with the choice of either agreeing to new taxes and triggering a huge conservative revolt; or exacerbating the public’s sense that their party is pathologically unable to compromise.
Democrats are privately pleased to find Republicans back in a box. But in public they’re pressing and taunting Republicans to back up words with action.
I don’t know. Is it taunting? Is that a fair way to describe this situation? The Republicans refuse to appoint conferees so that we can do the budget under regular order? After all that rhetoric?
Is this taunting?
“We have had Republicans yelling and screaming — sometimes violently — to have regular order. They said ‘Democrats should do a budget,’ even though we had a law [the Budget Control Act], they wanted a resolution. And we did that. Once that’s done — we’ve done that — they’re not interested in regular order,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters at his weekly Capitol briefing. “Chairman Ryan said ‘we want to have a pre-conference.’ You can’t have it both ways. Does he want regular order? Obviously not. So the prior talk was all happy talk — it meant nothing — because they are not able to fulfill the commitment that they’ve made to do regular order.”
I think it’s more like exasperation than taunting.