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Something happened in the Senate on Thursday. Something surprising. Something encouraging. Something almost...functional. You might remember that, in August 2011, Congress almost defaulted on the national debt. Eventually, the two parties reached a deal -- the Budget Control Act -- that would, among other things, cut more than $900 billion from the discretionary side of the budget over the next 10 years. This wasn't exactly a shining moment in the history of the United States Congress -- "and that, kids, is how the government decided not to create an unnecessary financial crisis in the middle of a fragile recovery" -- but at least we could move forward. Or so we thought. In recent months, Republicans have begun arguing that the spending levels set out in the Budget Control Act aren't low enough. Those are "ceilings," they say, not "floors." And so, where the BCA permits $1.047 trillion in discretionary spending, the House budge

The House Budget Committee has 38 members. Twenty-two of them are Republicans, Sixteen on them are Democrats. The committee is chaired by Paul Ryan, the conservative heartthrob whose budgets have, over the last few years, come to define the modern Republican Party. But on Wednesday night, when Ryan sent his latest budget to the committee that he runs, it squeaked through by one vote. And some of the dissenters were on his side of the aisle. Justin Amash and Tim Huelskamp, two of committee's most conservative members, voted against Ryan's plan. Another, Rick Mulvaney, voted for it in committee, but says he might vote against in on the House floor. As Erik Wasson reports in the Hill, "the tight vote indicates that next week House GOP leaders could face a larger floor defection than they did on last year's budget, which got every Republican but four behind it." And the dissidents have powerful supporters. The Club for Growth came out in opposition