Is it a given there would be a budget impasse, if all institutions of power are held by Republicans?
Non-American here with only a Mickey Mouse understanding of US mechanics of power.
Non-American here with only a Mickey Mouse understanding of US mechanics of power.
Without the dems they need almost every Republican to agree because their margin is only 5 votes. Historically this is difficult because their ranks now include several morons and extremists most notably the lady who actually believed Jews were responsible for starting wildfires with space based lasers.
If a handful of extremists don't ask for crazy nonsense they will still have every hand out for pork.
Then it goes to the Senate where it needs 60 votes including dems to pass anything. The first round of crazy if it passes anything might easily end up with something too stupid to pass the Senate without also termination of the fillibuster.
No. American political parties are more akin to continuously-branded coalitions than parties in the way they work in parliamentary systems. There is a minority of House Republicans who will vote down any budget bill because they reject the concept of federal government.
I’m not an expert on this topic, so please take these comments with a grain of salt:
1. The simplest way a budget impasse could start is with internal feuding within the Republican Party. Some Republicans are very aggressive deficit hawks all the time. Some Republicans are only “deficit hawks” when a Democrat is president, but they spend freely when a Republican is president. Note that almost all of the largest budget deficits since 1990 have been under Republican administrations (Covid years under Trump and Biden were wonky and should probably be asterisked). So the pork-seeking Republicans and the deficit hawk Republicans can get into a stand off about what the budget should be.
2. Even if Congress is on the same page, Trump can choose not to sign the budget if he doesn’t get his pet issues addressed. This may seem like something that they should be able to work out beforehand, but his “priorities” change, sometimes daily, often based on who he happened to have spoken to last.
3. Some republicans want the government to break. The playbook here is to break the system in some way, point out that the system doesn’t work, and then make attempts to privatize that system or massively overhaul that system (likely with massive cuts of workers and largesse to contractors). It may seem odd that an elected official strives to make the government not work, but they are able to make that tack work for them at the polls. I think that this is a deep (and warped) issue that is hard for me to explain well.
The current House has an even smaller majority of 2 currently, so it's now infinitely more possible for a deadlock to happen.
2 are nearly guaranteed to break because we have a couple of republicans that always vote no on budget bills because they want massive cuts to everything.
That means either the bill ends up completely destroying federal funding, which risks losing centrist republicans or republicans in tight district races. Or the bill ends up trying to win over a few democrats in similarly contested districts, which risks losing a fair bit of republicans that reject any bills that have democrat votes.
That is what Trump is doing via DOGE so the burn-it-down camp seems pretty well served, more than anytime since the post-war demobilization anyway. The impasse, if it occurs, is more likely to be with those in Congress that don’t want to reduce the size of government.
DOGE acts different. It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies. As such, its actions are inclined to ruin the fortunes and the business of the free marketeer camp, because those folks are functioning in the real world and have businesses, employees, and pay those employees in dollars.
So I don't think the 'burn-it-down' camp should favor DOGE. It is in no way their ally and is there to ruin them, in order to rebuild a society upon somebody else and leave 'em ruined. It's pretty plain to see DOGE's opinion of those people based on its attitude to H1B visas, for instance.
I see absolutely no evidence that the DOGE crowd wants to crash the economy and while they do have a utopian ideology so does the left.
Additionally, the DOGE crowd would say they’re trying to dismantle an unaccountable deep state conspiracy that threatens the American economy through an accelerating accumulation of government debt and regulations and has been trying to transform society globally for decades through political, social, economic, and military intervention all to serve the progressive elites.
I think both of your views are lacking in charity and perspective, although the DOGE view in so far as I’ve accurately described it has vastly more evidence backing it up.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
The quote is “markets will tumble” by which he clarifies that it will be a temporary market overreaction not “crash the economy” like it’s 1929. Those are qualitatively different things.
And not only that but a lot of the spending we engage is a mixture of minimally beneficial and/or outright corrupt. For instance at one point the Air Force was paying $10,000 for toilet seats. It's only after that received extensive publicity that they swapped over to simply 3D printing the seats, probably for a few bucks per seat. [1] There's about a 99.999% chance that the supplier for those $10,000 toilet seats had a rather low degree of personal separation from the person signing off on paying $10,000 for them. And now imagine how much you could save if you started wiping this nonsense out of the entire government.
Government spending, however, is accounted as part of GDP and other economic metrics. Each one of those toilet seats sent the GDP up, improved the economics of the company delivering them, and even created some jobs. So getting rid of this nonsense will obviously 'hurt' the economy in the short-run, but in turn you get a sustainable system, dramatically reduce spending, and create a more competitive economy. When it's even possible to sell toilet seats for $10,000 (easily replaceable by 3D printing), who cares about the private market? To say nothing of the fact that merit/competitiveness is obviously completely nonexistent or farcical for many government contracts.
[1] - https://www.military.com/defensetech/2018/07/11/air-force-no...