The reviews of last night’s hot mess of a GOP presidential debate are in: Rowdy, Unruly, Raucous, Chaotic. Sounds eerily similar to Speaker Ryan’s House Republican Caucus, the dysfunction of which continues to rival that of its party’s presidential primary.
The self-described “budget guy’s” months-long campaign to return the House to “regular order” was dealt another blow yesterday when, according to POLITICO, the influential Republican Study Committee’s membership voted to abandon Ryan’s budget deal. Speaker Ryan’s inability to lead his own caucus toward accomplishing his most basic legislative goal certainly does not bode well for his effort to counteract Trump and “turn the GOP into a party of serious policy,” as TIME noted yesterday.
“There’s no doubt that last night’s train wreck of a debate was cringe-worthy, but Speaker Ryan has to be the most troubled by it, considering that his ‘Year of Ideas’ gets further and further from reach with every insult Donald Trump dishes,” said Meredith Kelly of the DCCC. “If the Speaker can’t even lead his own caucus and prevent them from reneging on his budget deal, I wish him the best with his quest to transform his party’s likely nominee from an entertainer to a man of ‘serious policy.’ Put simply, Paul Ryan is no match for Trump.”
ICYMI: RSC urging House leaders to abandon 2015 budget deal
Politico
By Jake Sherman
February 25, 2016
The leadership of the Republican Study Committee privately decided Thursday they would push top House lawmakers to abandon the 2015 budget deal and push for steep cuts, the group’s chairman wrote in an email to colleagues.
The decision by the prominent conservative caucus casts serious doubt on whether the House will be able to pass a 2017 budget.
“The following position passed with over a 2/3rds vote,” Chairman Bill Flores of Texas wrote to his colleagues Thursday. “The House budget should cap discretionary spending at $1.04 trillion dollars; an amount below the levels allowed in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, with offsetting savings achieved through reductions in non-defense discretionary spending or through enacted mandatory spending reforms of sufficient magnitude.”
Flores wrote to his colleagues that “we are keeping this confidential while we work with House Leadership and Budget Chairman [Tom] Price to promote a conservative, Republican budget for House consideration.”
Flores also told his colleagues in the email that, “Unfortunately, some of these elements from this morning’s Steering Committee discussion regarding this item were leaked to the press; however, we request that we keep this confidential while we continue to work with the Budget Chair and Speaker Ryan on this matter.”
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) have already come under heavy pressure from hardline conservatives in the Freedom Caucus to renege on the budget deal with President Barack Obama and Democrats and cut tens of billions of dollars.
The RSC position makes passing a budget extraordinarily difficult. Ryan has said that a lower budget number would make it nearly impossible to launch a successful appropriations process — something he has said he wants to do. Without completing the appropriations process, Congress will likely be forced to fund the government in October by passing a continuing resolution or omnibus — something conservatives say they hate.