Regular order. For the past few months, it’s been a Republican byword, the potential cure to all of Washington’s ills. The interminable fiscal debates in Congress-the ceaseless parade of commissions, super committees, and gangs of six and eight-could be traced back to the lack of a Democratic budget under this thinking. After all, Senate Democrats hadn’t even managed to propose a budget since the first year of Obama’s presidency. “The right process is the regular order,” Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, said in a statement this past January. “A second term presents the opportunity to do things differently, and in the Senate that means a return to regular order,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor earlier this year. “I believe that it’s time to do regular order,” House Speaker John Boehner told ABC News in March.
For the latest issue of the Prospect, Jamelle and I profiled Patty Murray, the senior senator from Washington State who took over as chair of the Senate Budget Committee at the start of the year. It was an unenviable spot, as Republicans demanded a new Democratic budget as part of the deal to increase the debt ceiling at the end of January. But Murray managed to marshal the competing elements of her party and eked a budget through an all-night voting session in the middle of March, passing her fiscal vision-a budget which raises taxes on the rich by closing loopholes, replaces sequestration, and injects a small amount of stimulus to bolster the recovery-by a slim 50-49 vote. While the GOP voted against it en bloc and objected to its new revenues, many Republicans praised Murray for at least getting operations back to normal. “I just want to commend Senator Murray…for conducting an open, complete and full debate,” McConnell said on the floor just before the budget’s passage. “I know everyone is exhausted and you may not feel it at the moment, but this is one of the senate’s finest days in recent years.”
In late April when I asked Paul Ryan, Murray’s counterpart as the House GOP’s Budget leader, if he expected to soon sit across the table from Murray at a conference committee, he said, “I assume. I do expect ultimately we will.”
Yet Republicans balked when the time came to proceed to the next steps. According to their revered “regular order,” once both side of Congress passed their budgets they should have appointed representatives to a conference committee, a series of meetings where the two sides would hash out the differences between the competing budgets. Ryan and Murray spoke regularly throughout March and April to discuss forming a conference committee, but Ryan refused to cede ground and start the process.
When I spoke with Ryan he seemed pessimistic about reaching any sort of overarching deal through a conference committee. “I don’t expect a grand bargain, which is, a grand bargain presumably fixes the entirety of our problem,” he said. Per Ryan’s explanation, Murray’s budget doesn’t even qualify under the grand bargain rubric, since it fails to close the full deficit within the next decade like his proposal. “A grand bargain to me,” Ryan said, “means Medicare is solvent, Social Security is solvent, the debt crisis is permanently averted-or at least for a generation-the budget is balanced.” Ryan argued that he would not be satisfied unless Democrats caved to major cuts in entitlement reform. “Discretionary spending is not the problem, it’s the mandatory spending that is the big driver of debt in the future and we haven’t done anything on that.”
As Illinois Senator and Murray confidant Dick Durbin told me, “it will take nothing short of a political miracle to achieve” a full budget deal with House Republicans.11Senator Angus King, the mustachioed independent from Maine who sits on the Budget Committee, explained the problem to me with a typical folksy comparison: “Nothing is going to happen unless the parties want something to happen. If you enter into a negotiation about a car, the premise is that they want to sell and you want to buy. If that’s the premise you can reach a deal on buying a car, maybe or maybe not but you at least have a chance. If you enter into a negotiation to buy a car and the seller doesn’t want to sell his car, then no matter what you do it’s not going to happen. It really is going to turn on what the motivations of the parties are going into the discussions.”
Still, even if the prospects for a comprehensive budget deal are slim, Democrats aren’t going to cede defeat now that they’ve finally managed to pass a budget resolution. They at least want to hold Republicans to their past desire for the regular order. Murray and her Democratic colleagues hope to air their budget against Ryan’s in the spotlight of a conference committee; even if they can’t reach a deal they’d be able highlight its extreme nature in a public venue.
Left with no other options as Paul Ryan and John Boehner dilly-dallied and refused to appoint conferees, Harry Reid asked for unanimous consent to begin selecting members for the conference committee, only to be blocked. “After giving the Republicans what they said they wanted, regular order, countless votes and passage of a budget resolution, a strange thing happened: House Republicans did a complete 180,” Reid said in frustration when Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey blocked his request in late April. “They flipped. They’re no longer interested in regular order.” Since then, Murray has marched onto the Senate floor nine times to request a move toward conference, only to be stymied GOP senators.
She was blocked yet again on Tuesday, but the Republican resistance finally began to show fissures. At the end of the day on Republican Sens. John McCain and Susan Collins blasted their colleagues from the Senate floor, challenging the Tea Party-likes of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz to end their objections. McCain and Collins highlighted the stunningly sudden reversal in rhetoric from other members of their party, a shift Collins termed “ironic.” According to McCain, the refusal to grant a conference was “absolutely out of line and unprecedented.”
“We have called repeatedly for a return to regular order in this body,” Collins chimed in.” Well, regular order is going to conference.” Both senators rightfully explained that a conference wouldn’t disadvantage Republicans, since Ryan and his acolytes from the House GOP would dominate half of the committee.
Therein lies the rub. McCain and Collins’ critique of their party’s hypocrisy was a refreshing departure from the Senate GOP’s normal lockstep routine. But even if they manage to cajole their senate colleagues into granting a motion toward conference, it will mean squat unless House Republicans cave. “We understand that we come from very different philosophical premises,” Ryan told me last month, “but it’s our jobs to try and find out where the common ground lies.” That common ground occupies a tiny patch of the entire budget landscape, and there’s no reason to see it expanding anytime soon.
