GOP's Inability to Govern

Brian Beutler chronicles House Republicans' epic fail in Talking Points Memo.

But many close Congress watchers — and indeed many Congressional Democrats — have long suspected that their votes for (Paul) Ryan’s budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts. Today’s Transportation/HUD failure confirms that suspicion. Republicans don’t control government. But ahead of the deadline for funding it, their plan was to proceed as if the Ryan budget was binding, and pass spending bills to actualize it — to stake out a bargaining position with the Senate at the right-most end of the possible.

But they can’t do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you don’t just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who won’t vote for any appropriations unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly you’re nowhere near 218.

Kevin Drum comments for Mother Jones.

The lunatic wing of the Republican Party has long held views that are impossible to reconcile. This is one of them: they think they can slash spending without affecting anything useful. But it turns out that even their fellow Republicans don't agree. They simply can't cut spending as much as they want to. In March they passed the Ryan budget, with all of its gaudy promises. In July, the first time they tried to pass a Ryan-approved appropriations bill with actual numbers attached, they failed. And they failed even though this was really nothing more than a symbolic vote in the first place. It was just a starting point for further negotiations.

So now what? The tea partiers are true believers who refuse to compromise, and even the GOP's adults refuse to engage in a normal give-and-take with the Senate over FY14 spending. They're stuck, with Democrats smirking in the background and suggesting that if they want to be a governing party, maybe they should try some actual governing. It's hard to say what's next.

Andrew Sullivan agrees:

They are a slogan, not a party. And in the end, you do actually have to leave the Fox News studios and actually do the minimal amount to keep the government actually functioning. When they get there, they fall apart. The solution? A huge effort to throw these nihilists out on their ears in 2014, or to forge some kind of alliance between the Senate and a sane bipartisan majority in the House. The latter won’t happen if Boehner wants to keep his job. The former is deemed unlikely or impossible. That logic needs to be challenged.