Tick tock.
Only 15 legislative days remain before the September 30, 2013 deadline, and the House plans on being in session for just 9 of them, yet House Republicans are readying to toddle off to recess on Friday.
Before they can get there, though, they have to wade through some more self-inflicted fail.
On Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Hal Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, accused his party of abandoning Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget resolution that they passed in April, after House Republicans pulled an appropriations bill for Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.
“With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted just three months ago,” Rogers said, according to The Hill.
That sounds about right for House Republicans. Voting no on their own ideas in order to express poutrage over Obama’s second electoral victory is just what they do these days, so failing to implement their own budget should come as no surprise.
The Republicans’ problem is that once again, they let the tea wing run the budget process with Paul Ryan at the helm, and he can’t even do his own math. Now Republicans can’t do his math either, because they can’t make their cuts fit his budget. But they never really intended it to work. It was all rhetoric and fevered, fringe ideology meant for show.
Instead of doing what the House usually does at this time of year, Republican representatives are priming the pump for a big old fit of GOP style government shut down. Republicans are failing to pass appropriation bills on purpose so that they can use a continuing resolution to take hostages on ObamaCare. They don’t seem even slightly disturbed by the fact that continuing resolutions harm job creation, the economy and more. Uncertainty is their business.
House Republicans don’t seem to care that it’s their constitutional duty to handle appropriations through the Committee on Appropriations. Put a Republican in charge of the purse strings and you’re going to get exactly this kind of chaos and disorder, with a heavy helping of disdain for legislating.
House Republicans are getting ready to amble off to recess after working less time than previous congresses, and only passing 4 out of 12 appropriations bills (as of this writing). They got a budget passed for the legislative branch, of course, and the defense bill, naturally (keep the money flowing to their home districts).
The House has “declined” to proceed on Paul Ryan’s budget. You know the one- the one he ran as Vice President on. The one Republicans have been touting on TV as the holy grail of budgets. Turns out, it doesn’t work in real life. Not even House Republicans can make the math work.
We’d express shock, except everyone but adolescent boys and House Republicans knows that Ayn Rand’s monetary philosophy only exists as a work of fiction for a reason.
In five weeks, the fringe nihilists will be back from their recess of staged townhalls, so that they can do what their handlers are ordering them to do. The Koch brothers want a government shutdown over ObamaCare, and other Republican donors want fake scandals. Check and check. You’ll never hear a peep about their failure to work within the frame of their own budget.
Either their ideology is a big heaping pile of fail or they are failures. Which one is it?
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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