J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

There was a lot of sunny talk about common ground and shared goals when the four budget leaders of the House and Senate met on Thursday to prepare for the big negotiation to come. A joint conference committee has until mid-December to construct a 2014 budget and prevent another shutdown in January, and the leaders worked hard at sounding optimistic.

“It’s going to be a challenge but we believe we can find common ground,” said Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and chairwoman of the Senate budget committee.

That hope isn’t widely shared, however, and not just because of the miserable success rate of similar efforts. One of the biggest problems is that two Republican leaders of the joint conference — Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, ranking member of the Senate committee — both voted against the deal that re-opened government and prevented a default.



Think about what that means: A day later, the Treasury would have run out of borrowing authority and the economy would have begun to collapse, but these two rejected a bipartisan agreement to stop that from happening. The shutdown had already cost the country tens of billions of dollars, but the two highest-ranking fiscal planners in the Republican party wanted to keep it going.

A few days earlier, Mr. Ryan had been praised as a moderate for writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed that didn’t make the dismantling of health care reform one of the demands for ending the crisis. Instead, he wanted to use the extortion of a shutdown and default to cut spending even further than it has already fallen. And when the final agreement achieved none of that — because Democrats refused to have a fiscal negotiation under a threat — Mr. Ryan sulked and walked away from the deal.

“Today’s legislation won’t help us reduce our fast-growing debt,” he said, explaining why he had broken away from other House Republican leaders and voted no. “In my judgment, this isn’t a breakthrough. We’re just kicking the can down the road.’’

Actually, though, the agreement simply kicked the can where it belonged: to the committee that should have started negotiating a budget agreement last spring. Mr. Ryan and Mr. Sessions were essentially saying that they didn’t trust the negotiating process, where they have starring roles, to produce anything of substance. And that may be a pretty strong signal of how un-seriously they take the important work of the next two months.