House Republicans have passed the Paul Ryan budget resolution, a sweeping plan that slashes long-term mandatory spending, goes under the discretionary spending targets set by the debt limit deal, cuts taxes for the rich and corporations, changes Medicare to a voucher program, eliminates Pell grants for hundreds of thousands of students, and generally authorizes just about every conservative wet dream you can name. And after all that, Ryan’s budget doesn’t even balance until 2040, because it’s nearly impossible to do so without anything on the revenue side.

The vote was relatively close, with the budget passing 228-191.

After two days of trying and failing to pass a short-term extension of the surface transportation bill, Republicans will now use the regular process to try to force their extension through, with just days to go before a shutdown of federal transportation funding.

The most interesting portion of the night was the vote on a plan modeled on Bowles-Simpson, the plan from the chairs of the 2010 catfood commission. Reps. Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Steven LaTourette (R-OH) introduced the budget, which includes all the elements of Bowles-Simpson, including the tax increases, entitlement cuts, and magic asterisk for health care. And to prove that nobody in Washington cares about deficit reduction as much as they talk about it, the Bowles-Simpson plan crashed and burned, attracting only 38 votes.

The House may not have been able to pass a transportation bill yesterday to enable the smooth functioning of two million construction jobs, but they did find the time to kill a bunch of investor protections and deregulate the securities markets while passing the bill to deregulate potentially fraudulent investment practices.

The House vote on the budget will not just include an up-or-down vote on the Paul Ryan version. As per custom, several budgets will get a vote that day, including proposals from the Republican Study Group, Progressive Caucus and House Democrats. But there’s another version out there, one from what I’ll term the Wanker Caucus, looking to just put Simpson-Bowles on the House floor. Enter the magic asterisk.

The close call in the House Budget Committee for the Ryan budget led many to wonder whether the House leadership would have trouble with the bill on the floor. But The Hill reports that they’re making progress toward that goal.

We’re headed for a real showdown. The House has now rejected the bipartisan transportation bill from the Senate. Harry Reid has said that he would not accept a 90-day extension and wants to see the Senate bill pass. Something has to give.

Paul Ryan sped into action with his 2013 budget resolution. After releasing it on a Tuesday, he put it up for a vote in the Budget Committee on a Wednesday. This should have been immediately unacceptable to the other 37 members of the Budget Committee who allegedly have a function in crafting the budget. But they allowed the vote nonetheless. What’s surprising is that it only passed by one vote.

The Senate’s transportation bill, which passed earlier this week, is more bipartisan than good. The bill lasts for two years rather than the 5 years requested by the White House, and it funds at about 2/3 the level in the President’s budget request, which itself is relatively low according to infrastructure experts. That said, it begins to actually intelligently tackle infrastructure policy, albeit with limited means, and it’s certainly preferable to the eight stopgap bills that have been the sum total of Congress’ work on this policy since 2009.

It looks as if we’re moving toward stopgap bill number 9.

The Senate defeated several Republican amendments to the transportation bill yesterday, but the major ones all lost votes on the Democratic side. In fact, two got majority votes in the Senate, though they needed to cross a 60-vote threshold. The amendment to kill the EPA’s rule on limiting toxic emissions from industrial boilers failed 52-46.