There is no clearer sign of Mitt Romney’s growing inevitability than his recent string of big high profile endorsements. In just the past two days Romney has gotten the important endorsement of the Republican Party’s most significant current and former leaders, representing a broad spectrum of critical Republican constituencies.

Let’s briefly recap Congress’ busy day yesterday, as they head out for a two-week recess (Spring Break ’12 Cancun?).

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.

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 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.

I love a good provocative title as much as the next writer but it has to at least make some sense, which really doesn’t seem to be the case with Ezra Klein’s new article ‘Ryan May Lead to Single-Payer Health Care.’ As best as I can make sense of the rather strange logic leaps, Klein has basically made yet another total 180 reversal in his previous thinking. He is now arguing that Ryan’s plan, if enacted, would be so bad that at some point in the future it would magically make Democrats adopt single payer.

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.

As long as the news media devotes massive amounts of space to a fantasy budget, why can’t they turn their attention for just a minute to a more legitimate one Like last year’s CPC budget, which earned praise from the likes of Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman and even The Economist, the Budget for All makes up-front investments while reducing the deficit over time by making the tax code more progressive and scaling back on defense.

The Ryan budget has appeared as a chairman’s mark. It’s a long document written in Congress-ese, but I’ve already gone over some of the main points. Here are a couple other tidbits, including why the revenue and spending caps are implausible and the automatic mechanism that requires the President to “fix” to Social Security.

According to the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Paul Ryan (R-WI) House Republican budget outline, at least what can be analyzed given that Ryan leaves huge unanswered questions about how his tax provision would even work, the plan calls for massive cuts in public health care spending. The result of the cuts would be millions of Americans ending up worse off.