We’re 90 Days Away From The Next Budget Crisis

The can has been kicked down the road, but we’ll see that can again shortly.

The package to reopen the government runs only through mid-January, and lawmakers have pinned hopes to avert a repeat performance on a new bipartisan, bicameral conference committee. The last similar panel, the so-called super committee of 2011, deadlocked and adjourned in disagreement.

The new panel, to be led by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., will begin its talks amid a poisonous and partisan atmosphere after the first government shutdown in 17 years.

If the policy gulf between the two parties was not challenging enough, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are questioning whether anyone—even Ryan, the most respected voice on fiscal matters among House Republicans—can truly represent a fractious conference that pushed a government shutdown against its leadership’s wishes and then rejected its own speaker’s proposal to reopen the government.

“We’re ungovernable,” Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, said Wednesday. “There is no doubt in my mind that the last three weeks have made anything achievable in the House more difficult.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.