Brat Blames Ryan for Following Brat’s Rules
Virginia’s most useless Congressman™ is out on a book tour this week, where he recently gave a sales-pitch interview to Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM. You’ve really gotta read/listen to this.
Besides asking for donations and for folks to buy his book, Brat decides to explain why everything in Washington is messed up. Yet the interview is revealing about Brat in a way that only those who’ve been watching him closely have really figured out – namely, he has no idea what he’s doing, no idea what is actually going on, and is pathologically incapable of accepting any responsibility for the mess he helped create.
He even goes out of his way to blame Republicans for things that can legitimately and without partisan spin be attributed to the Democrats.
Take, for example, the upcoming short-term continuing resolution.
“I came in two years ago, and we had a cromnibus, then we had an omnibus last year, where conservatives had the budget caps increased, higher spending, lost all the conservative riders we worked on the whole year. And so, since the day I’ve been in here, we’ve had omnibus, omnibus – and then this year, our leadership’s saying, “Boy, we don’t want an omnibus,” but then today, you open the newspaper, and Obama and Mitch McConnell and the Senate are saying, “We don’t want a shutdown,” and “Boy, we’ve got to do a budget by December 9, in the middle of Obama’s lame duck.”
First, let’s be clear – the 2016 fiscal year ends on September 30. If Congress does not pass and the President does not sign either the remaining 12 funding bills (that’s 12 remaining out of 12, by the way) by September 30, we will have a government shutdown. So there needs to be either a short-term or a longer-term extension. This is a common thing lately, especially in election years.
So Brat here claims that it’s “Obama and Mitch McConnell” saying “we’ve got to do a budget by December 9.” That’s wrong. Harry Reid is the one who killed the idea of a long-term CR into next year, not McConnell. Reid told reporters two weeks ago that “[w]e’re not doing anything into next year and every Republican should be aware of that right now.” Reid also reported that President Obama said he wouldn’t sign a longer CR. Reid and the Senate Democrats have the power to hold up any bill because Republicans do not have the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture on a Democratic filibuster, so pushing forward with a longer term CR would be a futile waste of time.
So why does Brat say “Obama and McConnell” when he should be saying “Obama and Reid”? Why throw the GOP Senate Leader under the bus, especially when it’s not true?
It gets better though – Brat goes on to blame the CR on Paul Ryan for ignoring Brat and the Freedom Caucus in their demands for “regular order.”
“And then last week, in our member meeting, we brought up national defense, needs to be plussed-up. And I agree with that, but we should have solved that earlier in the year, when we had regular order.
And so me and the House Freedom Caucus guys, that’s the one thing we insisted on, when Paul Ryan rose to power. And he promised regular order, which means the budget stays in committee, and then goes on the Floor for a vote, where the American people can discipline us so we don’t get to make stuff up at the last minute.
And voila! – regular order is gone again.”
It’s as if Dave Brat went home for the August recess and completely forgot everything that happened earlier this year. Paul Ryan, indeed, promised regular order. And that’s what the House began doing earlier this year. It started with the House Budget, which Brat should be familiar with because he sits on the Budget Committee. He got his name inserted into the budget, and then, of course, voted against it – joining with every Democrat on the committee in voting against the bill.
That budget never saw the light of day in the House, because Republicans couldn’t get enough votes to pass it, so it was never voted on. Given Brat’s own demand that the so-called “Hastert Rule” block Speaker Ryan from bringing to the floor any bill that couldn’t get enough Republican support to pass on its own, Ryan was doing exactly what Brat and the rest of the Freedom Caucus demanded when he was first elected. He followed Brat’s own rules.
Yes, you read that correctly: Brat’s very own rules (#7) blew up regular order in March.
Brat ignores that inconvenient fact, and doubles down repeating multiple times throughout the interview that Ryan is to blame for the current budget mess.
“We shouldn’t be anywhere near a government shutdown because Paul Ryan and the leadership promised us regular order,” Brat stressed. “You cannot have a shutdown if you do the budget, and then vote on the Floor. There has not been a vote on the House Floor for the United States budget this year. It’s really quite unbelievable.”
Brat went on to say “[i]f you would have followed regular order, there would be no government shutdown because we would have already done a budget.”
We’ll leave aside the fact that passing a budget does not equal passing the spending bills (we passed a budget in 2015, still did an omnibus because the bills didn’t get done). Brat loves to sprinkle his interviews with DC jargon like “plussed-up” while then slipping into regular-person speak and equating the budget with the appropriations process, which are two separate things. Budgets set limits, appropriations bills actually spend money, and passing a budget doesn’t mean you’ll pass the spending bills nor does it mean you can avert a government shutdown. Hopefully Brat knows that, but you can’t take anything for granted with him.
Be that as it may, it’s as if Brat has already forgotten what his own “speaker commitments” were. They’re not on his website anymore, so maybe he’s trying to forget.
So what exactly does Dave Brat expect Paul Ryan to do? He’s faced with conflicting demands from the same people. Whatever Ryan did, Brat could complain. Ryan could have followed regular order and brought the House Budget to the floor, where it would have either failed or it would have passed without a majority of the House Republicans supporting it, which would have violated Brat’s “speaker commitments.” Or, Ryan could have done what he did – not brought a budget to the floor that didn’t command 218 GOP votes – and then be criticized by Brat for not following regular order (that’s Brat’s #10 speaker commitment).
Either way, Ryan was set up to fail by Brat’s own rules.
Even ignoring Brat’s contradictory demands, the Appropriations process stalled this summer after Senate Democrats torpedoed the Defense Appropriations bill. That had nothing to do with Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell – or Congressional Republicans at all, other than the Democrats were complaining about Republicans adding poison pills to these bills, like provisions to defund Planned Parenthood and roll-back LGBT protections for federal workers.
That’s not Paul Ryan’s fault – he can’t control the Senate. And it’s not Mitch McConnell’s fault, because he can’t get six Democrats to agree to do whatever Republicans want in the Senate so he can move bills forward. Even if he could, without President Obama’s support, these bills are all dead on arrival. Without compromise, nothing gets done. And that’s exactly what’s happening because Brat and others refuse to compromise, and keep throwing more sand in the gears of government all while pointing the blame at everybody but themselves.
That includes pointing the blame at the voters directly. Brat says the American people “[are] not doing their homework,” because they keep reelecting incumbents who vote for increased spending. “I mean, all the incumbents came back … some of them are voting to bust the budget. And so the American people have got to sharpen the pencil and do a little bit better on the homework.”
Looks like Hillary Clinton isn’t the only one who is blaming the voters these days. Apparently Brat seems to think that if only the voters would stop sending budget-busters to Washington, everything would be fine.
Yet it’s his and his colleagues own contradictory demands, coupled with their inflexibility, that are actually causing the problems.
Don’t blame Brat though – he’s just trying to fix everything. “I had to vote against the budget. I had to vote against the leadership because I promised my constituents I’d go up there and straighten things out,” he told Breitbart.
Do things look straightened out? Has Brat done anything to “straighten things out” in Washington?
If anything, his contradictory demands, and those of the Freedom Caucus, have brought about exactly what they complain about the most – Congress kicking the can down the road, yet again. Brat can blame anybody else he wants, but he has to take his share of the responsibility for the dysfunction in Congress. He’s done literally nothing to stop it, and arguably he’s done plenty to make it worse.
There’s more in that article, almost all of it the kind of self-serving whining you are apt to hear from a back-bencher who has been shut out of policy-making because he has no idea what’s going on. Brat has so often promised and pledged himself and his vote to his colleagues and then gone back on that word at the merest hint of disapproval from his sycophants in the 7th District that nobody can trust a word he says anymore, and they don’t. So he’s get enough free time to write a book and promote it, while the rest of the GOP is trying to govern. And when things get tough, he’s ready with a helping finger, pointing out where the blame should go.
Let’s be clear: regular order broke down this year because Dave Brat and his Freedom Caucus cronies did everything in their power to set Paul Ryan up to fail. They colluded with Democrats to vote against Republican drafted legislation, including the Republican House Budget. They tried to pass policy riders that they knew Democrats couldn’t stomach and would derail the process, but made for good election year fodder and fundraising emails. Even then, when they could have blamed Democrats for the obstruction, they revert to form, attacking their own colleagues first. Finally, they hypocritically demand that the GOP leadership waive a magic wand and do something that hasn’t happened since 1996, while they do everything in their power to make that impossible.
Of course, don’t ever expect Dave Brat to admit that.
After all, he’s got a book to sell.
