Friday, March 18, 2011

Will House Republicans Propose a Budget?

Ezra Klein has a nice item out this afternoon about the budget after today's CBO scoring of Barack Obama's budget (by the way, should I do a glossary post to explain stuff like that?) which ends:
My prediction, incidentally, is that this will hold true — perhaps even more true — for the Republican budget.
Which gets me thinking: do we really expect there to be a GOP budget? It's not clear why it's in their interest, at this point, to produce one. A formal budget proposal scored ten years out, or even five years out, isn't going to make Tea Partiers happy (they aren't going to get to balance), and even getting down below Obama's numbers after a year or two would require some cuts that would make other constituency groups upset. Paul Ryan's roadmap emphasizes far-future (in budgetary terms) cuts...even if everyone in the Republican conference wanted to sign on to that, and so far there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of enthusiasm, it isn't going to produce great numbers within the budget window. The safer path for the GOP leadership would be to just work on appropriations bills and bash the Democrats.

My understanding about the House rules passed by Republicans back in January give them the mechanism needed to maneuver without a formally passed budget; if that's the case, why go through the trouble of submitting one in the first place?

(The big advantage to working under a budget would be to use reconciliation to get things through the Senate. However, it's not likely that anything major is going to pass the House, narrowly pass the Senate and then be signed into law; any major budget deal is going to wind up having 60 votes in the Senate regardless of procedural requirements).

I guess I won't go out on a limb and make a firm prediction, but it sure wouldn't surprise me if the House Republicans decide to just ignore the "budget" part of the budget process entirely this year.

1 comment:

  1. Don't know exactly what "stuff like that" you're referring to, but more reference posts are always helpful!

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