House Republicans are appropriately dismayed with the Senate’s reconciliation budget framework bill—the Republican Senators shied away from the deep spending cuts that are needed, passing only a lick and a promise threshold of $4 billion against the earlier House-passed bill with its serious threshold of $1.5 trillion on the risible fiction that the $4 billion is a floor, and that more cuts will occur in subsequent legislation.

I’ve suggested one path to passing a budget framework: debate the Senate’s bill, rather than killing it outright, and amend the Senate’s version to include serious spending cuts. Then hold out for those cuts in the House-Senate Conference that would result.

In conjunction with that, Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) could commit to not bringing any of the dozen appropriations bills that would be the actual spending bills to the floor for debate unless and until all dozen are passed out of committee and those committee’s spending cuts aggregate, across all of the bills, to the required total spending cuts of the House-passed $1.5 trillion, or a skosh less if that’s what fell out of the Conference Committee agreement and passage.

Along those lines, Johnson could require all of the committees, particularly the chairmen, to work with each other to achieve the total spending cuts and defense and border spending increases that are necessary.

That last also would push the committees—including the Chaos Caucus members and the timid-on-spending-cuts Republican members—to honor the Congressional sessions-old commitment to pass all of the appropriations bills on time, with no need for any Continuing Resolution foolishness.

Come to that, Johnson should make that appropriations bills commitment regardless of any framework bill conference committee outcome.

Update: After I wrote this and scheduled it for publishing, the House Republicans went ahead and passed the Senate’s bill 216-214, and they did it without any floor debate or amendment to make the bill meet their requirements.

Silliness, indeed.