Collective Conscious

When Repub­li­cans con­trolled all the branches of gov­ern­ment, they found it con­ve­nient to skirt bud­get rules by use of emer­gency fund­ing:

One par­tic­u­larly abu­sive mech­a­nism is the des­ig­na­tion of sup­ple­men­tal spend­ing as an “emer­gency.” The emer­gency des­ig­na­tion makes it eas­ier for pol­i­cy­mak­ers to skirt bud­getary rules, par­tic­u­larly “pay-​​as-​​you-​​go” (PAYGO) requirements.

The fol­low­ing chart from the paper shows how sup­ple­men­tal spend­ing, most of which was des­ig­nated as “emer­gency,” has taken off in the last decade:

Now that they only have one house, it looks like they’ll try to do it by con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion:

In all prob­a­bil­ity, his idea of a com­pro­mise is a short-​​term CR at the greatly reduced spend­ing lev­els House Repub­li­cans pro­posed on Fri­day (story here; list of pro­posed cuts here).  A sim­ple exten­sion of the exist­ing CR at the cur­rent lev­els not only might not be accept­able to Ryan but, given the way House Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee Chair­man Hal Rogers (R-KY) was forced to come up with addi­tional spend­ing cuts last week when his orig­i­nal plan was deemed too small by some mem­bers of the GOP cau­cus, it’s not clear that a sim­ple exten­sion could even pass the House.

Appar­ently Repub­li­cans are deter­mined to avoid the reg­u­lar bud­get process by what­ever means nec­es­sary. Too many rules, I guess.