That was fast.
The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee unveiled their absolutely insane fiscal 2018 budget proposal yesterday morning, but it was seemingly abandoned as early as late last night.
An early whip count on the proposal did not turn out well for Republican leadership hoping to pass the proposal strictly along party lines.
After launching a whipping operation Monday night to gauge interest in voting on the full spate of spending bills, GOP leaders walked away with a tally of dozens of Republican lawmakers who said they couldn’t commit — as well as several hard “no’s” — to voting for the partisan bundle of 12 bills, according to Republican lawmakers and aides. [...]
The initial vote count was so dismal, in fact, that Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) told Republican lawmakers in a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning that the tally set a record for the most “undecided” responses, according to people who were in the room.
I was open to the idea of Speaker Ryan pulling together enough votes to advanced this through the House before it dies in the Senate, but I was apparently being far too generous.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has reportedly informed members that rather than vote on a full omnibus spending bill, they will instead vote on a "minibus" collection of noncontroversial funding measures such as funding for the Energy Department and Pentagon.
That will leave other areas of the government unfunded beyond the October 1st deadline, but by giving up their leverage to extract concessions with security funding bills, their efforts to obliterate federal spending will be isolated.
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This also means their "tax reform" proposal and their latest proposal for defunding Obamacare will have to be split off from the omnibus, which is no longer an omnibus.
“I don’t think Republicans on their own can pass any budget but the national security bills,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Tuesday.
He's right.