Mitch McConnell does not want to shut the government down again and he appears to have no faith that Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will be able to come to some kind of budget agreement by mid-December, so he is convening talks among (almost exclusively) non-Confederate members of his caucus in the hope that they can come up with a plan. From what I can see, they can’t.
Lawmakers who participated in the meeting say the No. 1 goal of the group is to coalesce around the demand that any budget deal reached by next January maintain the spending cuts established by the 2011 Budget Control Act.
The group’s second priority is to give federal agencies and Congress more flexibility to manage spending levels established under sequestration.
A third priority is to achieve savings in mandatory spending programs such as Social Security and Medicare. This last goal is seen as a reach, given that Democrats have demanded pairing tax increases to any reforms of the major entitlement programs.
Most lawmakers in the group have ruled out raising taxes as part of any medium-sized deal to fund government through 2014 and turn off sequestration.
The Democrats will be interested in that second priority that would give them more flexibility to set priorities within a ludicrously austere budget, but the rest of it won’t interest them in the slightest.
There isn’t even the slightest hint that the Republicans have figured out a way to fix the problem they have created for themselves. How are they going to pass a farm bill or a transportation bill or restore funding to the Pentagon’s budget without making a single concession to the Democrats? They still have no idea.
