House Republicans on Friday missed the deadline for passing a budget for the next fiscal year, and instead left town for the weekend in the hopes they can reach a deal next week.
Republicans continue to struggle to find common ground with their fiscally conservative members, who want a budget that cuts spending in 2017 more than the level agreed late last year.
The missed April 15 deadline isn’t rattling the GOP leadership, as there is no rule prohibiting them from passing a budget after April 15. But it’s something of a defeat for Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who began the year with an ambitious plan to pass a budget resolution early in order to provide more time for Congress to complete the 12 federal spending bills on time for the first time in decades.
Without a budget resolution, the House must wait until May 15 to bring spending bills to the floor. The shortened timeline, Republican aides admit, makes it less likely lawmakers will have time to debate and vote on all 12 spending bills.
“It would be difficult,” one top Republican aide acknowledged.
Ryan said he’s not giving up on a budget resolution. He has instructed Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., to keep working on a plan that would win over enough GOP support to pass the plan without Democrats, who typically vote against GOP budget resolutions because they call for reductions in entitlement spending.
“Tom Price has been busy working on the budget,” Ryan said before the House gaveled to a close for the week. “But I know for a fact that he is very, very motivated to get moving on budget process reform. So I encourage his efforts in doing that.”
Democrats played up the missed deadline as a major GOP failure that highlights internal party divide, although their party never passed a budget while in the majority.
“Missing the date is not nearly as significant as the reason why,” said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The Republican Leadership proposed the most devastating Ryan ‘Road to Ruin’ budget in history, and even that wasn’t brutal enough for the radical forces that have taken control of the House GOP.”
However, the lack of a budget deal does not halt he appropriations process, which has already started at the committee level. Without a budget, the House can pass a “deeming” resolution, which sets a top line spending number in place of a budget resolution, effectively acting as if a budget has been passed.
In the Senate, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem concerned about the lack of a budget deal. Both chambers have begun working on spending bills in committee.
Neither party has reason to panic since the two sides signed off on a fiscal 2017 deal last year. That deal caps discretionary spending at $1.07 trillion, a number that exceeds federal spending caps by $30 billion. Republicans and Democrats say the extra money will spare them from having to make the big spending cuts that in past years have made it impossible to pass appropriations legislation.
“They don’t have one, so there’s nothing to ignore,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said of the missing House budget resolution. “Because of the law we passed last year, that will be no problem.”
But conservatives who oppose the $1.07 trillion deal could make it much harder for Congress to pass individual spending bills without attracting significant Democratic support.
Fiscal hawks in the House are insisting that lawmakers appropriate to the lower $1.04 trillion spending level.
“Let’s start passing appropriations bills at $1.04 trillion,” said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. “Send them over to the Senate, let the Senate deal with them, if they send it back to us as something else, we’ll deal with it then.”
On Friday, GOP lawmakers ended the legislative day without any hint they were ready to throw in the towel on a budget deal.
“The budget process is an important one,” Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said. “We are continuing to work through it. It is in committee and we are looking forward to bringing it to the floor.”
