Marching toward a Shutdown

The budget-process contortions in both houses of Congress just now can be a little hard to parse. A lot of them have taken the form of battles over procedure, which can get mind-numbing pretty quickly. At various times, the House has been intensely focused on rules votes and the Senate has been mired in arguments about suspending the prohibition on non-germane amendments on appropriations bills. These procedural squabbles matter, but they are ultimately proxy fights. The real battle is a dispute about how to exercise leverage in the modern Congress....