The House Ways and Means Committee stuck around for a rare Friday session of Congress in order to grill Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about a whole load of nonsense ostensibly regarding President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget proposal. At least, that’s what the majority of Republicans did while entirely ignoring her critical warning to them.
“In my assessment—and that of economists across the board—a default on our debt would trigger an economic and financial catastrophe,” Yellen told the committee. “I urge all members of Congress to come together to address the debt limit—without conditions and without waiting until the last minute.”
Republicans glossed over that, and in fact over much of the actual budget, preferring to repeatedly lie about the 87,000 new IRS agents who are all going to be armed and, oh I don’t know, break people’s doors down to audit them at gunpoint? Also how the low unemployment numbers are all a pack of lies papering over the fact that employers can’t get workers since the pandemic. It would have been nice if some Democrat on the committee—Yellen couldn’t do it because she was a guest there—had pointed out that GOP anti-mask and anti-vaxx hysteria killed a bunch of the workforce. But they didn’t. They also didn’t point out that the Ways & Means Committee wasn’t having hearings on the GOP budget, because there isn’t one.
That’s Biden’s fault, Barely House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Thursday, making a preemptive excuse not only for not have a budget now, but not delivering one for the next month and a half, apparently. “We were going to do the budget in April, but unfortunately the president’s so late with his budget it delays ours,” McCarthy told reporters. In case you’re wondering, no, that’s not how any of this stuff works. The House is not required to wait for a budget proposal from the White House to come up with it one of its own.
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There are lots and lots of reasons they don’t have a budget, starting with the fact that there aren’t any Republicans in the House anymore who know how to Congress, or if there are, their skills are no longer relevant to leadership. What matters to leadership is a member’s ability to yell about stuff that doesn’t really matter but makes the right people enraged.
The difficult McCarthy has is those yelling people are demanding things that are not possible, and the not-yelling people don’t want to associate themselves with that, but also don’t want to stick their necks out in support of things that are possible. That leaves Whip Tom Emmer in the position of trying to build a unicorn—meeting with all the factions in “weekly listening sessions with small groups of Republicans” to see if there’s anything that 218 of them would agree on. That would then not be trampled over by the Freedom Caucus.
The impossible things include, but are not limited to: balancing the budget in 10 years without touching Social Security and Medicare; slashing federal spending by historic amounts without touching defense spending, which must be increased; and taking food, housing, health care away from huge swaths of the population without doing irreparable harm to the economy (and those people who they want to keep voting for them). None of this can work, and all but the most fanatical and boneheaded of them knows it. However, there are enough boneheaded fanatics to deny a 218-vote majority.
So here we are. Even those who understand reality have a skewed view of it. “We’ll figure out something we can all vote for,” one GOP lawmaker told Politico anonymously in order to “speak candidly.” The concession to reality? “No way the Senate will take it up, but it’ll force them to respond.”
That’s the GOP in a nutshell. Forcing the other side to respond. They exist to troll.
All of which means there is not going to be a budget for 2024. There will be a series of continuing resolutions starting at the end of September that will continue after the election. They will keep government limping along at current spending levels, each coming with the threat of a government shutdown. The boneheaded fanatics might even get their wish of a government shutdown.
This is not to say that Biden’s budget—which will not pass in any form as long as the House GOP majority exists—is meaningless. He’s laid out a statement of values for the American people for Democrats to run on in 2024, one that sharply contrasts with the dystopia the GOP is fighting for. That’s important. But it’s not going to stop the GOP from inflicting maximum chaos and pain between now and November 2024.
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