Has his time finally come?
House Republicans have been waiting for this moment, a Republican Senate that will set a new agenda for the country with them based on
an old budget.
House Republican officials said the first budget blueprint of the 114th Congress will not stray far from the plans drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and the departing Budget Committee chairman. Those plans, passed along party lines three times since Republicans took control of the House in 2011, were never going anywhere with the Senate in Democratic hands.
With this month's Republican sweep in the midterm elections, the stakes have changed.
"They're firing with real budget bullets," said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. "Real people will get hurt." […]
A quarter of the cuts in the bill would come from programs for the poor. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized insurance premiums under the health care law made up more than a third of the package’s savings.
That means the Medicaid block grant scheme that will
ultimately kill the program and the scheme to turn Medicare into a voucher system that will
cost seniors more and more out of pocket, and drastically undermine the system. This despite the fact that the "deficit has fallen from $1.4 trillion in 2009—or nearly 10 percent of the economy then—to $483 billion, or 2.8 percent of the economy." Which makes it below the average for the last forty years.
The new Republican Senate might be a little more circumspect. New Budget Committee chairman Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III has been a big fan of the Ryan budgets in the past. But he's got four Republican committee members who are up for re-election in 2016 in Democratic-leaning states—Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Rob Portman in Ohio—who might be a little less enthusiastic about following the House's slash and burn strategy. It works for House members who are safely gerrymandered in their snug little districts, but is a little harder to run on statewide.
And, of course, a Ryan budget will face a presidential veto. Which means essentially the past several years of budget brinksmanship—including government shutdown threats—will continue as Republicans try to force President Obama to their will. It also means two more years of temporary funding mechanisms—continuing resolutions—that keep the government limping along.