House Republicans passed
one of their budgets Wednesday night, and it is a doozy. (All the House Republican budgets were doozies.) The budget resolution that
passed was Republican leadership's favored plan, which repeals Obamacare and cuts food stamps, Pell Grants, Medicaid, and much more, while increasing defense spending and giving tax cuts to the wealthy. As Steve Benen
writes:
If “a budget is a moral document” that reflects lawmakers’ “values,” the House Republican budget approved yesterday tells us, in frightening detail, that GOP morality is predicated on the assumption that low-income families have it too easy – and high-income families have it too tough.
Here's a measure of how extreme it is:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters yesterday that when he talks to voters about the specific provisions of the Republican budget plan, the public balks – Americans assume he’s exaggerating, because the idea that GOP officials would actually vote for such a radical scheme seems “absurd.”
It does seem absurd. Absurd both on the human level that Republicans would support such vicious, destructive cuts and on the political level, that they would support such unpopular cuts. But the fact that it's so unbelievable that any political party would come together to push these measures protects Republicans from the consequences of their actions.
The House budget lost a number of Republican votes to a fight over whether to focus entirely on cutting or to increase defense spending—the latter won out—and now Senate Republicans will face a similar internal fight, with four of the party's presidential hopefuls—Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham (snicker)—looking to stake out their ground going into 2016. Even beyond those four, Senate Republicans will have to seriously consider how extreme (and which kind of extreme) they want to look. That means more Republican infighting, but sadly it doesn't necessarily mean better policy than has come out of the House.