Congress

House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (MD) attended a press conference today with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Democratic Members of Congress, Grammy award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Puerto Rican advocates to discuss the need to take immediate action to address Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. 

Speaker Ryan has been trying for weeks to rally his conference around a budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2017, with last night’s House GOP conference meeting set up to be their final pitch to the conference. How did it go? Shocker: not well. While House Republican leaders tried to sound optimistic in the press, the House Freedom Caucus has announced that it is officially opposed to the GOP proposal. Why does that matter?

This week, Speaker Ryan continues to struggle with deep divisions in his party over a path forward on a budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2017. 

Since Speaker Paul Ryan took the gavel in October, he has repeatedly expressed how important it is for Congress to pass a budget and return to “regular order” through the appropriations process. Yet his conference continues to be deeply divided over whether to adhere to the spending levels that both parties agreed to in the bipartisan budget agreement that was enacted last year. 

Speaker Ryan and House Republican leaders pitched their budget for Fiscal Year 2017 to the Republican conference this morning, reopening the bipartisan budget agreement by promising conservatives $30 billion in additional spending cuts. And if you think that means the House is any closer to considering a budget, think again. Republicans’ latest pitch didn’t seem to go over well with the conference, and the lack of specifics did nothing to appease the more hardline members of the party.

A gaggle of top House Democrats derided Speaker Paul Ryan's newly developed GOP task force on poverty on Wednesday, arguing that the group was a "sham."

Speaker Ryan can’t unify House Republicans around a budget resolution for Fiscal Year 2017, so yesterday he called in Senator McConnell to try to talk some sense into the extreme Members of his party. A look at today’s headlines shows that it didn’t go well for him either:

The Hill: McConnell tries to sway House conservatives on budget deal

For years, Republicans have consistently said that Congress has a fundamental responsibility to pass a budget.