John Spratt: “The irony of this bill is that it elevates the budget resolution to a joint resolution so that it has the force and…”

“The irony of this bill is that it elevates the budget resolution to a joint resolution so that it has the force and effect of law, and then it takes the contents of this newly elevated resolution and literally guts it. It reduces us from what we have now, a debate on programmatic priorities, the different functions in this budget, which are more aligned to programmatic spending than any of the 13 appropriation bills that we have. It takes those and relegates them to the committee report so they lose a lot of their cause and effect. Secondly, it takes the one power that we have as a committee to sort of move the budget process and require committees to do what the House would have them do, a process called reconciliation, and also relegates it to the report. So having raised the status of the resolution to a law, it then downgrades the contents of them to relative insignificance. It means that, when we have the budget debate on the floor, we will be talking about big aggregated numbers that do not mean a lot of anything.”