House Republicans are coming to a consensus on this year’s budget bill: There won’t be one.
GOP lawmakers are universally accepting that the party will blow past a budget deadline on Friday, and say voting on a budget at all this year is unlikely.
{mosads}“That’s the way it is. C’est la vie,” Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) told The Hill on Wednesday when asked about missing the April 15 deadline.
Faced with resistance from the right, GOP leaders are now barreling forward on individual appropriations bills. They hope to leapfrog the spending fight that tanked the budget blueprint while making good on Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) high-profile promise to restore regular order to the spending process.
Ryan’s budget hopes have been quashed by several dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus, who rejected the House Budget Committee’s resolution because it sticks to a spending deal negotiated last year with President Obama. That deal capped spending at $1.07 trillion, about $40 billion more than the previous year.
Those spending caps, a remnant of former Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) tenure, have already been signed into law, which technically allows the House to skip a budget this year. Under current rules, the House can begin voting on appropriations bills starting May 15 without first approving a spending cap.
Ryan and Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) have said for months they planned to pass a budget anyway. Doing so would allow the House to immediately begin work on the Congress’s 12 annual spending bills.
It would also allow Ryan to make good on his promise to deliver a platform of conservative policy ideas during an election year, when the majority party’s infighting could threaten Republican control of the House.
“We know the rules. I think we should pass a budget, and we’re still talking with our members on how we can get that done,” Ryan said at a press briefing on Wednesday.
But the Wisconsin Republican had been carefully lowering expectations about the GOP’s ability to pass a budget for months as the resistance within his party grew. It also became clear the Senate would not pass a budget, nixing the chances of a “reconciliation” process, which would have given the party a shot at moving filibuster-proof bills.
In February, at a closed-door meeting of his conference, Ryan floated the idea of skipping a budget.
“It would be a shame, but the sky won’t fall if we don’t do a budget,” he said, according to a person in the room.
Still, as recently as March 22, Ryan suggested he would not break precedent by moving forward with the appropriations process without a budget. Asked if he would bring spending bills to the floor without a budget, Ryan told reporters then, “No, we need to do a budget.”
But his tone has shifted again. In Wednesday’s briefing, Ryan would only say he was not “foreclosing any options.”
Many lawmakers, including those on the House Appropriations Committee, have long accepted the reality of a year without a budget.
“There’s no news there,” Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said to reporters on Wednesday.
The panel is now moving aggressively on spending bills. The first bill — funding for military construction and veterans affairs — passed the full committee just hours after Ryan told the House GOP conference he didn’t have enough votes for a budget.
Two other appropriations subcommittees also held markups on Wednesday, with the pace expected to pick up next week.
“What we’re trying to do now is pass as many bills as we can get through in full committee while we wait on the budget question,” Rogers said after the conference meeting Wednesday. He said the committee is prepared to wait until May 15 to send its bills to the floor in the absence of a budget resolution.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who oversees health and labor funding on the committee, said going without a budget “makes it tougher” to advance spending bills by the July 31 deadline.
“You’d like to start moving some of these as quickly as you can,” Cole said Tuesday evening. “But if we have to wait, we’ll wait.”
Cole, a longtime appropriator, acknowledged that the House is unlikely to pass more than six or seven spending bills, about on par with last year. He said the House would “very likely” have to pass a stopgap measure to resolve the remaining funding areas this fall.
“The more you can get done now, the better off we’ll be,” Cole said.
The idea of going without a budget was once unthinkable for a House Speaker who is a former Budget Committee chairman.
In years when Democrats have controlled the budgeting, Republicans have harshly criticized their counterparts for missing budget deadlines.
In 2013, Ryan was a vocal supporter of a “no budget, no pay” bill in the House, after the Senate missed its deadline. The House also approved the Require Presidential Leadership and No Deficit Act from Price, which aimed to shame President Obama for missing his budget deadline.
This week, Democrats are playing the GOP’s budget problems for laughs.
“We’re shocked,” Rep. Xavier Becerra (Calif.), head of the House Democratic Caucus, said with a chuckle as he described the GOP’s inability to unite around a budget.
House Republicans had little hope they could meet Friday’s deadline after returning Tuesday from a two-week recess.
The budget was left out of this week’s to-do list of legislation and got little attention from most members over the break.
Several conservatives say they’re giving Ryan a pass for failing to pull the party out of the budget mess.
“As much as Paul tried, he couldn’t move enough folks to the Republican budget and not enough of us would go with the Boehner budget,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus.
“I’m blaming the former speaker. [Ryan] is an heir to the house that John Boehner put together.”