Of course, that argument was rudely rejected back in 2013 by Republicans. But more importantly, the dozen spending bills, which should be moving along with dispatch right now to meet the deadline of October 1, when the new fiscal year begins, are hardly moving at all. In the House, the Boehner budget deal was designed to “clean out the barn” for Ryan. Instead, the barn’s been soiled by the pesky Freedom Caucus, the right-most wing of the right-wing majority party. Despite Paul Ryan’s many moves to accommodate Freedom Caucus members, bringing them into the leadership fold and consulting with them regularly, they have given him the middle finger on spending bills, holding firm against any change in the sequester numbers. And that, of course, puts Ryan right where Boehner was for several agonizing years. To get the Freedom Caucus members to go along, Ryan will have to make concessions, which will lose other Republicans and allow Democrats to rip the bills apart with their own amendments. That means no bills with Republicans alone, and no stomach to bring up bills that will only pass with support from a passel of Democrats.

In the Senate, where the dollar totals are less of a sticking point, the open nature of the appropriations process means, as Brookings’ Molly Reynolds points out, that poison pill or killer amendments make passage difficult there as well. By this point in the cycle, with the sharply attenuated year that accompanies a presidential contest, with about seven weeks to go before the long summer break, the appropriations bills should be moving smartly through the pipeline—even with the procedural roadblock that is in place because there is no overall budget. After all, each has to pass the House, pass the Senate, go through a conference committee to resolve differences and get to the president—and hope there is no veto. The difficulty was underscored by the weeks that went by without action in the Senate on an energy and water appropriations that, unlike many other spending bills, had broad bipartisan backing—thanks to an amendment not on energy or water, but on…. Iran!

That bill finally passed the Senate last week. But the odds that most or many appropriations bills get enacted before the witching hour occurs barely more than a month before the election? Close to zero. And that means continuing resolutions, threats of partial shutdowns, and other embarrassments of governing failure.

Now add the embarrassment of the unprecedented failure of fundamental fiduciary responsibility by the Senate to even acknowledge the right of a president to nominate an individual to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court with eleven months to go in his term, and then the obdurate refusal to hold a hearing on a nominee many key Republicans, like Orrin Hatch, had praised to the skies before his nomination, before turning him into a nonperson. It was an embarrassment from the time immediately after news broke that Justice Scalia had died, when first Senator Mike Lee and then, within an hour, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted that there would be zero consideration of an Obama nominee to replace him. The point man in this exercise, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa, has become Obstructor-in-Chief.