Republicans spent the last four years criticizing Senate Democrats for failing to pass a budget resolution, and for operating outside of what’s known as “regular order” on Capitol Hill, resorting instead to informal processes and “back room deals.” Earlier this year they even attached a rider to legislation increasing the debt ceiling that would have withheld member pay in the event that either chamber failed to pass a budget.
But now that they’ve gotten their way, and the Senate has passed a budget, suddenly they’re the ones squeamish about “regular order.” Instead of promptly appointing negotiators to convene a so-called conference committee and iron out the differences between the wildly different House and Senate budgets, House Republicans are eager to either return to the smoke-filled back rooms of legend, or kill the budget process altogether.
“We want to go to conference when we feel we have a realistic chance of getting an agreement,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the GOP’s top budgeter, told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday, saying he wants members of both parties to take a detour and agree to a pre-conference “framework” before resuming formal negotiations. “We don’t want to conference when we have an endless process that focuses on our differences. … What we want to do is have constructive dialogues to find out where the common ground is and go to conference when we have a realistic chance of coming out with an agreement.”
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 agree to ditch the anti-tax absolutism.
Republicans would thus be forced to choose between 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.
“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.”
Outside of the formal conference negotiations, the budget process creates other problems for the GOP.
If conferees can’t put a unified budget together easily and quickly, they are subject to “motions to instruct” in both the House and the Senate.
That would put House Republicans in effectively the same position Senate Democrats faced during their budget “votearama” — required to vote, for the first time in quite a while, on politically charged measures in a process open to members of both parties.
Not only would House Democrats enjoy a rare opportunity to force Republicans to vote on controversial issues — from Chained CPI to Medicare privatization — Republcians would face intramural fights if right-leaning members forced votes on wildly out-of-the-mainstream measures of their own.
The GOP could avoid that headache by pulling the plug on the budget debate altogether. But that will reinforce a growing sense among elite opinion makers that Republicans the obstacle to a budget deal that puts the era of fiscal brinksmanship behind us.
“We have the opportunity to go to conference through regular order, debate our very different approaches, and hopefully come to a fair, bipartisan deal,” Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) said in her opening statement at a Tuesday hearing. “This process — which I would think my Republican colleagues would want to begin as soon as possible — will require tough choices on both sides. Democrats have consistently shown we are willing to do so. And now it’s on Republicans to join us at the table ready to compromise.”
