Speaker Mike Johnson has inherited the same problems that faced Kevin McCarthy. Turns out, he doesn’t have a solution either.
Government funding runs out next week, House Republicans keep tanking their own appropriations bills, and the Speaker of the House is weighing whether he can get away with a stopgap spending solution.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the exact situation Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) found himself in September—only now, it’s November, and it’s Speaker Mike Johnson’s problem.
Republicans are hoping Johnson will somehow deliver a solution to all of their legislative woes. But without a recognition that the House GOP isn’t going to magically come to agreement about a host of issues—like overall spending levels, individual policies in appropriations bills, or the fact that the Democratic Senate and the Democratic President aren’t just going to swallow Republican bills—a solution doesn’t appear in the offing.
“It’s the same. It’s the same set of issues. Again, the same tectonic plates,” said Rep. John Duarte (R-CA). “New speaker, nothing’s changed.”
The biggest hilarity is that the debt ceiling they are using was put in place to give congress some control back when the whitehouse was writing the budgets. Congress does that now so its a debate about following through with the things they already approved.
It exists now purely to be used by Republicans as a stick to beat Democrats with. They’re literally holding the country hostage to try to force Democrats to meet their demands. If things were sane there would be a deadline to meet and if the deadline wasn’t met it would automatically default to the previous years budget with a small across the board bump for inflation. They will never allow that though because it completely nullifies the threat.
Congress always writes the budgets; it is their constitutional power.
The President may release a budget he wants, but it is nothing more than a wish list.
Congress authorizes the budget but until this act it did not really draw it up itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_and_Impoundment_Control_Act_of_1974
But that was only because the Budget And Accounting Act pushed the initial budget authorship responsibility to the President.
yes. it basically is a rule that was just needed for a few decades but causes no end to grief now. If congress does not want to borrow more they should have appropriate taxes or spending in the budgets they pass.