The Washington Post has a good article this morning on the response on Capitol Hill to Trump’s budget.

The big news is that the biggest opposition to Trump’s budget is coming from—it’s almost getting predictable, at this point—not the Democrats but the Republicans.

Some of President Trump’s best friends in Congress sharply criticized his first budget Thursday, with defense hawks saying the proposed hike in Pentagon spending wasn’t big enough, while rural conservatives and others attacked plans to cut a wide range of federal agencies and programs. The bad mood among Republican critics was tempered by a consensus that the president’s budget wasn’t going very far on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers reminded everybody that they ultimately control the nation’s purse strings. “While we have a responsibility to reduce our federal deficit, I am disappointed that many of the reductions and eliminations proposed in the president’s skinny budget are draconian, careless and counterproductive,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) the former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. “We will certainly review this budget proposal, but Congress ultimately has the power of the purse.”

No president ever gets everything he wants on the budget, but this is Trump’s first year in office, the moment when he should be getting maximal cooperation. We’re now past the 50-day mark of Trump’s First 100 Days, and he has yet to win a single major victory. That doesn’t put him in the best negotiating position when it comes to dealing with Congress. Certainly not with the opposition, and increasingly, it seems, not with his party either.

What’s doubly interesting here is that the opposition from his party is as incoherent and divided as Trump himself.

One part of the party thinks Trump’s budget doesn’t go far enough; John McCain thinks that Trump’s increases in military spending aren’t nearly as big as they should be. Another part thinks Trump’s budget goes too far—either on increasing defense or decreasing spending on social programs and elsewhere. Another part doesn’t like the way Trump is going after their district-level pork. And there’s a last part—this one shocked me—that thinks that, when it comes to foreign policy, Trump’s budget pushes too hard on the military front, not hard enough on the diplomatic front.

Several Republicans also said they were wary of the deep cuts Trump proposed for foreign aid. “As General [Jim] Mattis said prophetically, slashing the diplomatic efforts will cause them to have to buy more ammunition,” Rogers said, referring to the defense secretary. “There is two sides to fighting the problem that we’re in: There is military and then there’s diplomatic. And we can’t afford to dismantle the diplomatic half of that equation.”

That particular argument is almost an exact replay of the fight over Reagan’s budgets, only this time, it’s not Democrats saying the Republican president is leaning too much on hard power; it’s Republicans.

Three takeaways:

First, as I’ve said many times now, despite their reputation for party unity and discipline, the congressional Republicans are all over the map. We saw this in the fight to unseat John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and it was only their opposition to a second term for Obama that allowed them to paper over the fissures. Now those fissures are out in the open.

Second, the room for maneuver on Republican fiscal policy is rapidly narrowing. The Republicans, including Trump, want major tax cuts. Some part of the party, including Trump, also wants major increases in defense spending. Trump has said you can’t touch Social Security and Medicare, and even though hardliners in the party claim they want to privatize or eliminate these two programs, when the Republicans had their chance under George W. Bush to do it, they balked. And behind all that are the Obama-era agreements on spending and sequesters as well as these rules about pay-as-you-go—as well as another looming debt ceiling crisis—that stipulate that an increase in one area needs to be balanced by a decrease somewhere else or a tax increase. It’s really not clear where the GOP can go; they’re boxed in and they’ve boxed themselves in. Something’s gotta give.

Last, in the LRB six years ago, I argued that fiscal crises of the state, historically, have been auspicious moments for the left (think the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution). That began to change in the 1970s, when the radical right and the neoliberal center used related-type crises to push either austerity or supply-side economics, programs and policies we’ve been living with ever since. But given where things are now going—where the right, which has been in the driver’s seat on economic policy since the 1970s, finds it way forward increasingly blocked—it could be that we’ll find ourselves, in the coming years, in a fiscal crisis of the more familiar sort.

Not exactly a fiscal crisis like those that marked the modern era, when the monarchy literally began running out of money to pay for wars and other forms of state-building and was forced to summon a more democratic formation in order to raise money. After all, the deficit right now is not especially high, and there seems to be no sign that the American state couldn’t continue borrowing. Most of the constraints today are politically self-imposed, but in a way that’s the point: these politically self-imposed constraints seem like they are increasingly hamstringing movement on a range of fronts, and it could be that those hamstrings are at a breaking point.

An intelligent and properly aligned progressive opposition could use this moment to drive home the point that we do not find ourselves in this cul-de-sac just because of Trump or the GOP’s incompetence but because of a half-century of misalignment and misplaced priorities; the right and the neoliberal center have brought us to this impasse. An intelligent and properly aligned progressive opposition could use this moment as an opportunity to smash through the self-imposed constraints that both parties have placed on the imagination and on policy. An intelligent and properly aligned progressive opposition could use this moment the way its forbears did: as a moment to call forth a new political formation of the left.

It’s possible—if the left can get its act together.