Michael Barone‘s latest column assesses the potential political results from debate over U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan’s latest budget proposal.
As I listened to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan describe his latest budget plan in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute this week, I couldn’t help thinking how different things will be in Britain when Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne steps out of No. 11 Downing St. with a battered red briefcase holding his budget for the forthcoming year.
Ryan’s budget will almost surely be passed by the House of Representatives, all but four of whose Republican members voted for his budget last year. But it will not pass in the Senate, whose Democratic majority in defiance of legal requirements did not produce a budget for the last two years and is poised to not pass one again this year.
Britain’s parliamentary system works differently. The majority coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will pass Osborne’s budget in the House of Commons. It will be approved perfunctorily by the House of Lords, and it will certainly not be vetoed by the Queen.
But Ryan’s initiative has moved us some distance toward what is in effect a parliamentary system and could move us much farther along that trajectory if the elections go the Republicans’ way in November.
By proposing budgets that cut tax rates, require future changes in Medicare, maintain current defense spending rather than cutting it and rein in discretionary domestic spending, Ryan has supposedly gone out on a dangerous limb.
And his fellow House Republicans, elected in a year of protest against huge increases in government spending and deficits, have been willing to go with him.