Remember that sly budget trick from last week?
Sec. 4. House Resolution 1493 is hereby adopted.
What was H. Res. 1493? As I later explained:
That's the "deeming resolution" people have been talking about using as a substitute for adopting a full-blown budget resolution this year. Only they've been avoiding the use of the term "deeming resolution" this time, probably because of the bad experience they had with the "deem and pass" procedure that had been proposed for dispensing with the health insurance reform legislation earlier this year.
The deeming resolution is harmless enough in isolation. It's been used before, by both parties, to deal with budgeting when tensions ran high enough to make passing a regular budget resolution too difficult. And it has the added political benefit of not forcing Members to vote on deficit projections in an election year, the prospect of which undoubtedly contributed both to the tensions preventing them from passing a regular budget and to their attraction to this alternative.
I suppose sly dealing only invites more sly dealing. But naturally, Republicans have to add their own unique twist of B.S. Observe the latest wingnut Twitter and blogospheric craze now being passed around:
Never before -- since the creation of the Congressional budget process -- has the House failed to pass a budget, failed to propose a budget then deemed the non-existent budget as passed as a means to avoid a direct, recorded vote on a budget, but still allow Congress to spend taxpayer money.
The phrase is being repeated verbatim by teabagger types, wherever you can stand to look.
But is it true? Well, I suppose PolitiFact might say, "barely true."
Why? Well, because it's true that the House has never before failed to pass a budget and then deemed one passed instead.
But the Senate has. Four times. And all under Republican control. And as we all know, it couldn't make less of a difference whether the House alone did or didn't fail to pass a budget and then deem one passed. It matters only whether or not the Congress fails to pass a budget and then deems one passed.
And it has. As I said, four times. And again, all under Republican control.
It happened with the budgets for fiscal years 1999, 2003, 2005 and 2007. And remember that the budget for any given fiscal year is something dealt with during the prior calendar year. That means the fiscal year 2007 budget was dealt with in the Republican 109th Congress.
Your source: the Congressional Research Service (PDF).
But guess what? I get a "false" rating, too! Because I said deeming resolutions had been used in the past by both parties when passing a budget became too difficult or impossible, and that's not exactly true. (Explanation: Once, on the first day of the new Congress in 2007, Democrats had to pass a second deeming resolution for Fiscal Year 2007, to mop up the mess left by the Republican deeming resolution passed in 2006.) So the fact is that until now, every time one of these resolutions has been passed in lieu of a formal budget, it's been done by Republicans.
So how's that for an added bonus? An illustration of the limitations of the PolitiFact game, wherein the semantic contortions used to intentionally mislead you into believing that deeming resolutions are totally without precedent is somehow factually superior to my statement that mistakenly leads you to believe that although it's happened before (which it has, and is the important part), both parties might have been equally responsible (which they weren't).
Isn't that something? But that's an issue for another day.