House Speaker Paul Ryan will attempt to get his unruly Republican conference on the same budget page Friday, giving them more than a week off (yes, they're taking another week off) to mull over whether to recognize reality, or keep doing what they've been doing and leave the House in chaos. The hard-line Freedom Caucus wants to reject the budget agreement worked out last fall by outgoing Speaker John Boehner and severely cut domestic spending levels. Ryan and his leadership team, as well as the Republicans who aren't maniacs, want to demonstrate that the House is capable of functioning normally, and build a budget based on that hard-won agreement. Ryan is stuck in the middle.
Conservatives are revolting against higher top-line spending levels negotiated last fall by President Obama and Ryan's predecessor, then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). GOP centrists are digging in on the other side, pledging to kill any budget that deviates from the two-year, bipartisan budget deal.
Ryan has been listening to all sides and hopes his party can work out its differences internally, insisting he's not the "micromanager" or "dictator" of the House. But the former Budget Committee chairman still believes sticking with the current figures gives the House the best chance to return to regular order and a more traditional appropriations process.
That would put the power of the purse back in the hands of Congress, he's argued, so lawmakers can hold the Obama administration accountable.
That's an argument that is falling on deaf Freedom Caucus ears. "I am not one of those people who will be constrained by the number from last year," says one of them, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). "There are a growing amount of people will not do that." At the same time, there's an increasingly fed up bunch of Republicans who are revolting against the revolters, represented by Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) who says that he's got plenty of Republicans on his side that will vote against any budget that doesn't adhere to the Boehner-Obama deal.
Meanwhile, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi isn't making any promises to bail Ryan out, and certainly won't be there to do so if the Boehner-Obama deal is scrapped. Nor will Senate Democrats, who could derail it with a filibuster on their side if Ryan somehow managed to scrape enough votes together to pass it. Ah, reality, the bane of every Republican House speaker.
Ryan is almost certainly going to have to give up on the whole idea of passing a budget and just proceed to individual spending bills that use the caps set by the Boehner deal. There could be enough opposition to that from the maniacs, though, to derail that as well. Which could mean another showdown in the fall when Congress has to keep passing short-term funding bills under the threat of a shutdown. Which would also mean Paul Ryan will fail just as badly as John Boehner.