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“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” (Lk 14:28)

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As part of February’s deal to end the government shutdown, Congress promised itself it would study the budget process to figure out why it’s so bad at simple things like passing spending bills on time and keeping the government open.

That study has now begun.

“I walk in here hopeful and optimistic, and yet at the same time, cynical,” said Sen. David Perdue, who is one of the GOP’s members on the bipartisan select committee tasked with delivering recommendations by December.

Most lawmakers say they know the problems. Political posturing, aversion to tough votes and perennial fights over the size of scope of government all make it easier for Congress to put off spending battles as long as possible.

Coming up with solutions that don’t give one party an advantage over the other is tougher….

Both parties discovered that they had more leverage as the junior partner in Congress if they had the threat of a government shutdown looming, figuring it would be embarrassing for the party in power.

Congress had gone six years without passing a full budget before doing so in 2015, when the GOP retook unified control of the Capitol.

They passed budgets for both 2017 and 2018 last year, but those were done to pave the way for passing an Obamacare repeal and the $1.5 trillion tax cut deal on majority votes through what’s known as the “budget reconciliation” process. Neither budget became the basis for governing annual discretionary spending.

“If you haven’t set up a process in which there is any reward for bipartisanship, and the only meaningful prize that can be taken from the whole enterprise is a partisan reconciliation bill to jam something through under the 60-vote threshold, it’s the only prize in the game,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat.

“So you’re either not going to play the game at all or that’s the prize you’re going to go for,” he said at a recent event hosted by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget….

Rep. David Schweikert, Arizona Republican and a member of the pension committee, said he hopes members are willing to deal in facts and not retreat to their typical political corners, saying their reforms could serve as a template for how to deal with other struggling pension funds.

“For those who either want a quick bailout or a bonding mechanism that just sort of moves the debt off their books and puts the debt somewhere else — none of those actually solve the problem and in many ways they make the future problems even worse,” he said. (Excerpts from David Sherfinski’s article in The Washington Times)