The Republicans hit a new low in their years-long refusal to participate in governance, snubbing the administration’s budget director as they opened hearings.
Breaking with a 41-year-old tradition, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees announced that they would not even give the president’s budget director, Shaun Donovan, the usual hearings in their panels this week.
G. William Hoagland, who was the Republican staff director at the Senate Budget Committee for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and is senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, said he could not recall a year since the modern budget process took effect in the 1970s when a president’s budget director was not invited to testify before the budget committees.
It isn’t difficult to understand what’s going on here: They want to insult the administration more than they want to pick through the hard choices and govern.
Congressional Republicans, in short, are as screwed-up as the party’s presidential contenders; they are an existential threat to the nation’s well-being.