Steny Hoyer: GOP Budget a Work of Science Fiction

     To be sure of a rather morbidly, bloodcurdling kind. One talking point the GOP has gotten a lot of mileage out of is the complaint that the Senate Democrats haven't passed a budget in 4 years. This is technically true, but not really very important.

     Such budgets after all are nonbinding and simple exercises in ideological intent, a blueprint . The House GOP has passed umpteen budgets the last few years-each one ending ObamaCare-and these have hardly been "serious" as they knew very well that none of these would pass. Regarding the latest Ryan budget:

    " the Ryan budget resolution isn’t a bill that can become law, but rather a blueprint, establishing overall spending levels for specific segments of the federal goverment."

    http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/03/hoyer-to-boehner-good-luck-with-that-budget-of-yours.php

    Hoyer's point is that while the GOP can pass this budget on a party line vote, when it comes time to do the real work of appropriation of funds based on this blueprint they won't have the votes to do it-it would require such draconian cuts beneath sequester levels:

    "The hard work of approproating those monies to specific departments, agencies and projects comes later. That’s when abstraction becomes reality and lawmakers struggle to fund their preferred programs — and ones favored by voters — within the constraints Ryan imposes. Republicans hope to pass the Ryan budget in the House this week."

   "That reality, Hoyer suggested, means the GOP should temper the its enthusiasm for the sort of partisan policymaking included in their entire budget."

      “In my view if you took all the Democrats out of the House and all the Democrats out of the Senate and the Ryan budget passed and then they tried to implement it through the 12 appropriations bills and the Ways and Means Committee … they could not get the votes on the House floor or the Senate floor to pass it,” Hoyer said. “And the reason for that is because the draconian actions they would have to take, and the adverse impact it would have on working Americans, middle class Americans, and their country, would be such that they would ultimately have to vote against their own policies made real.”

       Of course, the Ryan budget doesn't pass the Senate. So we'd have the specter of the GOP trying appropriate spending levels in various programs that they voted for as a whole but wouldn't have the votes to pass item by item. So with all the talk of seriousness, the House budget isn't serious either. It's a sop to the Tea Party. 

       UPDATE: This just in. GOP House does go through with the charade and passes the Ryan budget. 

       http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/03/three-years-running-house-republicans-pass-radical-budget.php

       Clearly elections don't matter at all. This budget's austerity is deeper and the level of painful cuts far deeper than last year's version of the Ryan budget. This doc4ment should be used a lot by the Democrats for 2014.