You’ve gone and urged that folks have perspective on budgetary matters. Can’t be having any of that: Didn’t you get memo that refusal to pass a continuing resolution using the FY2000 baseline is the current litmus test for purity within the Republican Party?

Honestly, Ryan can’t unveil his budget soon enough, if only to put an end to this silliness, on way or the other.

He’s willing to talk to Lefties like Alice Rivkin. Heck, he even sat on Obama’s deficit reduction panel: QED, he’s a tainted RINO who needs to be purged for the good of the Republic.

On a more serious note, the histrionics that come up whenever Republicans back even an inch away from H.R. 1 are wearing. We’re arguing over cuts ranging into the dozens of billions of dollars for the current fiscal year, of which there are five months left. That’s certainly not a reliable metric for whether the GOP House has betrayed the spirit of the 2010 midterms. Ryan’s budget, conveniently enough, is a reasonable metric: Either it’ll hit the right notes or it won’t, and if it’s the latter, then crying the sky is falling will actually be in order, as the House’s budget is the GOP’s official alternative to what the Dems are peddling.

There is little question that those advocate shutting the government down yesterday over the Senate’s refusal to pass H.R. 1 are conservatives, as the term is broadly used to describe the political Right that embraces limited government and fiscal prudence. Admittedly, they tend to have more libertine streak than the abstracted conservative, and the anarchist rumblings that turn up in comments threads about “politics having run their course” are disconcerting to the abstract conservative’s Inner Burkean, but I’d still say they’re within the big tent established by modern conservative fusionism.

That said, I think such intemperate impatience is horridly wrongheaded and liable to do much greater harm than good to the cause, but those are differences of opinion on tactics rather than ideology.

The hill you’re asking the GOP House to die upon is a five month continuing resolution for a budgetary baseline they didn’t craft. What does dying on this particular hill accomplish, exactly? To prove that the Republicans are “serious” about deficit reduction? That H.R. 1′s policy riders worth the maelstrom that’ll be kicked up by a government suchdown? How are both not accomplished by giving the House GOP another two weeks to roll out its budget, which will in all probability account for both?

The 112th Congress has been in session for three months. These things take time. At the very least, let the House GOP roll out the actual budget it’s crafted before accusing it of folding at the drop of a hat on fiscal matters.

“Conservatives” want a through-and-through overhaul of most of the institutions of government, greatly reducing the size and scope of it in the process. How long must an institution exist in order to be considered “traditional”? Social Security’s been in existence for nearly eight decades: Should “conservatives” seek to preserve it? Most certainly not, as most readers of this site would cry, because preserving Social Security as it has existed for eight decades will help guarantee Fiscal Armageddon, to say nothing of the perversities that are rampant in the program. What about the edifice of Wagnerian unionism? As a creature of the Depression, it too ought to be offered a fair amount of deference by “conservatives”, but most around here would gladly grab their torches and pitchforks to join in tearing it down.

We’ve never used “conservative” in the political context that it was in Europe, where conservatism was defined by monarchism and resisting the rising tide of Romantic ideas. All American conservatives are classical liberals, with all of the horrible nomenclatural problems that causes given the expropriation of the word “liberal” by the political Left following the fall of Progressivism.

So if you fight with all your vigor and intensity to carry the day on the small spending bills, you’ll be able to do the same on the big sutff? Never was much of a believer in such, myself. Always have thought that Congress operated on the inverse of that: As political capital is a scarce resource, the goal is to preserve and deploy it for the big-ticket items you really want, even if it means compromising and even rolling over on the small potatoes.

Given the number of big-ticket items the House GOP wants to pursue, it seems a mistake to go to the mat for a smaller-than-desired range of cuts to a five-month continuing resolution to a budgetary baseline that the GOP had no substantive hand in creating.

So I wholeheartedly agree that in all we do, even in undoing the affronts of the past, that prudent incrementalism is best. Your previous post just allowed me to put on my political philosopher’s cap, which I don’t get to do nearly enough.