budget politics

As the very quick negative response yesterday from the House GOP showed, the White House was never going to get even a reluctant, grudging admission from the Republicans that the Obama administration did something even marginally positive on the budget when it announced it's new deficit reduction plan.

I suspect that many of us here at CG&G will have something to say about it soon, but I'm going to let the dust settle a bit before reacting in detail to the budget plan announced today by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

Except for this:

The vote on the House floor on the Ryan plan potentially will be as damaging for the GOP as the vote on health care reform was for Democrats.  If that becomes common wisdom, the plan, which is likely to be adopted by the House Budget Committee tomorrow on a straight-line party vote, could very well be defeated when it is considered by the full House. 

That would be as close to political devastation for Ryan and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) as you can get.

My column from this morning's Roll Call explains why and how what House Republicans are doing to themselves on the budget in 2011 is what they did on a smaller scale in the late 1970s. It didn't work out well back then either.

GOP Has Put Itself Into a Corner on the Budget

By Stan Collender
Roll Call Contributing Writer
March 29, 2011, Midnight

The Concord Coalition has now joined the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in praising the remarkably vapid and incredibly inconsequential letter 64 senators sent to the White House last week asking for a comprehensive deficit reduction effort but not even hinting that they will vote for it if it is developed.

As I said in my post about the CRFB press release about the letter, the fact that the Concord Coalition thought the letter deserved to be hyped may say more about how desperate deficit reduction groups are to show something they can classify as progress than about any actual progress.

At this point I have to wonder whether CRFB and/or the Concord Coalition had anything to do with drafting the letter and getting senators to sign it.  I have no information that indicates they did either of those things, but it's not uncommon for in

Bruce had one of his, as usual, very astute columns in The Fiscal Times last week (posted here on CG&G) about how the tea party wing of the Republican Party is about to force the GOP’s hand on the budget.