Conservatives ready to support 1 trillion hole in the budget

In a dramatic reversal, many members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus said Thursday they are prepared later this month to support a budget measure that would explode the deficit and increase the public debt to more than $29.1 trillion by 2026, figures contained in the budget resolution itself.

As they left a meeting with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Thursday, some of the conservatives said that spending targets contained in the budget for fiscal 2017 are symbolic. The real goal of the budget legislation, they argued, is to establish an opportunity to finally make good on GOP promises to repeal President Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

“I just came to understand all the different ideas about where we go next,” said Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus that typically opposes massive spending increases. Schweikert now says he will probably vote for the budget resolution.

The growing conservative consensus comes nearly one year after the approximately 40-member group announced it would rather torpedo the entire budget process than vote for a fiscal blueprint that increased spending without balancing the budget.

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The collective shrug from other conservatives is the latest evidence that Paul’

s protest would be a familiar, lonely one. His floor speech attacking the budget measure for making no attempts at deficit reduction — it projects a $9 trillion increase in the debt by 2026 — was preempted by statements from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), pledging to vote for the resolution anyway.

That position has made Paul one of very few Republicans still talking about the debt as a national crisis worth building legislation around. During his presidential campaign, which ended after the 2016 Iowa caucuses, Paul made a number of attempts to draw attention to the national debt and to promote his annual plans to balance the budget with steep spending cuts.

Months later, most of the Freedom Caucus — 17 members — voted against the GOP’s 2016 budget on debt-reduction grounds. The new budget resolution makes even fewer concessions on debt reduction. For Republicans who frequently described the debt as a threat to their children’s futures, it’s a difficult sell.

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