Deja Vu Governing: Another Fiscal Year Ends, Another Budget Crisis Looms

Two weeks from now, the U.S. fiscal year will end.  On October 1, without a new budget, there will be no official way to pay for any government program.  Another shutdown crisis looms.

what eye thynk:   Early this year, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) called on the Senate to pass a budget and blamed past government money problems on their inability to do so.  The Senate called his bluff and passed a budget in March, their first in four years.  The President presented his 2014 budget proposal in April.  The House then spent the next few months passing its own budget with details finally beginning to be being revealed in June. 

So far, this is the way things are supposed to work.  The next step would be for members of the House and members of the Senate to meet in committee to work out a compromise budget made up of pieces of all three budgets.  This final fiscal plan would then be presented to both chambers of Congress, and the business of funding the country would go on. However, House Republicans, being allergic to the word "compromise," have spent the past 3 1/2 months refusing to meet with Senate Democrats, essentially stating that the country will run on their budget or it won't run at all.

Now, House Republican leadership--if you can call what John Boehner does "leadership"--thinks it has found a way to avoid another government budget showdown while at the same time recording yet another attempt to defund the ACA. 

The proposal is to have the House pass a resolution that would continue funding the government at current sequester levels. (Thus avoiding the need to meet in committee with Democratic Senators and do something positive...like govern.)  They would add an amendment to that bill that would defund the ACA.  One House vote, two pieces of business taken care of.  The Senate would then take two votes; the first, of course, would vote down the ACA amendment. With the second, they could vote for the budget resolution thus keeping the country limping along, though at sequestration levels which even Republicans claim to hate.

John Boehner: "None of us like" the sequestration policy.

Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) House Majority Leader: The sequester "is not the best way to go about spending reductions." 

Hal Rogers (R-Kentucky) House Appropriations Committee Chairman:  The sequester is "unrealistic," "ill-conceived," and "must be brought to an end."

You have to wonder, if they believe the sequester is so awful, (and on that they are correct), why they just don't meet with members of the Senate and work out a better plan.  Oh, wait, that would involve compromising.  Never mind.

Speaker Boehner's plan avoids a government shutdown that would most assuredly be blamed on Republicans, (a recent poll shows 51% of Americans think that the Republican Party would be at fault if we run out of money at the end of the month, 27% would blame the Democrats, 22% don't have a clue); but it is not a step forward, only another piece of theater, a way to make members of the House feel good about themselves because, hey, they tried and whatever happens now is out of their hands.

It is a coward's way to save Republican "face".  And it's not working.  Uber-conservative, new-age Republicans have indicated that they find this plan unacceptable.  As one political pundit put it "These folks don't want a symbolic, feel-good gesture; these folks actually want to force a budget crisis in the hopes of denying millions of Americans access to affordable health care.  Republican leaders are afraid of the fallout of a government shutdown, but rank-and-file Republicans don't give a darn."

Speaker Boehner, whose weak leadership is more about begging than leading, is essentially telling hard line conservatives that he can't give them the shutdown they want but he can extend the destructive sequestration so they can continue to campaign on how much they hate it, and at the same time they get to tell everyone how they voted to defund the ACA--again.

And this is where we stand, months after competing budgets were passed then left to molder, and weeks before another government shutdown looms. In our current toxic political climate, Republicans could refuse to go along with the Speaker's proposal or Senate Democrats could refuse to go along with continuing the sequester.  Or a miracle could happen and Congress could grow up and act like the adults we thought we elected and get down to doing the job we pay them to do.

But they better hurry up and do something.  After all, they have to clear time on their busy calendars for the next debit-ceiling crisis--coming sometime in November.