Friendly Reminder: GOP budget strategy
by digby
This seems like a good day to reprise this post from last month by long time congressional observer Stan Collander:
…I need to again refer back to something I posted more than two years ago, right after I was the first speaker at the first meeting of the House tea party caucus. (You can read all the details here.)
I was talking informally with a number of the members of Congress who had been there after the meeting ended. There was unanimous agreement among those members that the biggest thing the House GOP had done wrong during the 1995 and 1995-96 shutdowns was that it had given in to Bill Clinton too early. The GOP would have gotten a much better deal, they told me, if it had pushed harder and been willing to keep the government closed longer.
Pushing until the very, very last minute has been one of the mainstays of the House GOP’s negotiating strategy on budget issues ever since . With one exception — House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) unilaterally deciding nine days before the deadline to cut a deal with the White House to extend the reduction in the payroll tax — every budget decision since 2011 has gone up to, and in some cases beyond, the deadline.
I’d guess we’re going to have a tense week, right up to the last minute.
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