The House of Representatives passed their continuing resolution to fund the government for the first part of fiscal year 2012, but the odds of a government shutdown increased because the House offset disaster relief funding, while the Senate opposes offsets.

Yesterday’s setback for Speaker John Boehner on a continuing resolution to fund the government shows what little real control Boehner has over his caucus. With 242 members, Boehner has the ability to pass any legislation he wants without Democratic crossover votes – and in this case he got 6 Democratic crossovers. He has a good deal of power at his disposal to threaten Congressmen, to tell them their legislation will never see the light of day, to withhold needed campaign support, to knock them off committee assignments. He did all this and more yesterday. And he still could not budge the more conservative members of his party.

The House failed to pass a stopgap continuing resolution to fund the government today, as Democrats mostly held together to reject the bill, which included a cut to a clean vehicles loan guarantee program to offset disaster relief funding.

The reason that the minority Democrats had leverage at all was because House conservatives refused to vote for the stopgap bill, which funds the government for two months in Fiscal Year 2012 at the level of spending agreed to in the debt limit deal. Those 48 conservatives wanted to break the deal and cut spending to a lower level than the agreed-upon amount. And John Boehner couldn’t whip them to his side.

What the Republicans are doing is saying that a natural disaster must cause government accounts to drop. It assumes there’s a finite amount of money available for spending, and if a hurricane blows through your house, someone else, in this case hybrid vehicle manufacturers, have to pay for it. Now, the Chevy Volt had nothing to do with the hurricane. But they’re bearing the burden for rebuilding after the storm.

This is completely unprecedented in the history of the nation and defies common sense; that’s why Reid is fighting it, to make sure it doesn’t become a new normal.

Last night, it didn’t look as if the Senate would be able to get the clean extension of both the FAA authorization and the surface transportation authorization before a deadline of today. Tom Coburn was holding up the bill in a fruitless crusade against bike paths. It’s a long story.

The attempt to meet looming deadlines and avoid shutdowns of part (or all) of the government resembles the aftermath of a car wreck right now. It’s unclear whether the Senate can move the broken-down vehicles off the road in time to let the traffic move through.

It was only a matter of time that the Republicans’ newfound desire to lower the volume and not take hostages to achieve their aims would fall apart. We apparently have gotten through the FAA authorization extension, the surface transportation extension, and the debt limit vote without incident, but things are starting to break down. John Boehner is looking to hold back some reserve of funds for the FY 2012 budget, in order to force policy changes:

Because we didn’t have enough to worry about, the Federal Aviation Administration could shut down Friday, if Republicans insist on including certain controversial provisions into a short-term extension.

The GOP House leadership is really pissed at Tim Pawlenty for trying to derail the deal, and this report will only anger them further. Boehner’s whip operation is definitely nervous and trying to nail down the last few votes.

The smoke and mirrors discussion is a lot of smoke and mirrors. While it’s true that a lot of the cuts reflect accounting changes and one-time reductions from increases meant to only last a year, and in general terms the budget could use a spring cleaning every now and again, the truth is that this mainly speaks to the hazards of putting together continuing resolutions year over year, which inevitably lead to these problems. There’s a huge opportunity cost in scoring these as cuts. Money reduced from an already completed Census can be put to use elsewhere; money from unspent transportation earmarks can be excised and shifted into program budgets. This would be a matter of routine in any normal budget year. Turning them into cuts is not “smoke and mirrors”; it’s real-dollar losses that will magnify over time as these numbers become the new baseline.