A result is that Congress hasn’t completed the entire budget process, with all the spending bills, on time in more than 20 years. Many years, it has not passed any budget resolution at all. This is perhaps the most basic responsibility of the legislative branch, yet for decades, Congress has repeatedly come up short.

During the Obama administration, Republicans talked about changing this. Senator Mitch McConnell promised that he would pass a budget every year if and when Republicans gained a Senate majority. But in 2016 there was no budget resolution at all, which led us to the unusual situation we saw last year, where there were two budget resolutions, one to set up the failed Republican health care bill and another, later in the year, to set up tax reform.

That Congress can fail to pass a budget with so little consequence — if anything, it boosted Republicans, by giving them two opportunities to try major partisan legislation — shows what a cynical charade the process has become. The eventual budget resolutions that were passed reveal how disconnected the process has become from actual budgetary considerations. The Republican resolution a year ago was what’s known as a “shell budget” — essentially just a set of instructions that would have allowed the health care bill to be passed with a simple majority vote.

The health care bill, whatever its merits, was not a budget, or a central component of anyone’s conception of what a budget should be. But that’s what the budget resolution was used for. And that is, in many ways, the problem: The budget process is not really about budgeting anymore.

In other years, the budget process has become bogged down, and Congress has kept the government funded through temporary extensions known as continuing resolutions (C.R.s) that fund government operations based on current levels, or rolled everything into an omnibus — or in some cases, a “CRomnibus,” combining a budget omnibus bill and a continuing resolution. It’s kludgy language to describe a kludgy process.

The reliance on an ad hoc system of budgeting has made it even more difficult for Congress to keep the nation’s fiscal house in order. The continuing resolution passed by the House this week would have added about $30 billion to the national debt.

The stalemates that have come to define the budget process have helped set the stage for repeated shutdown showdowns. It is a broken process that has enabled and empowered partisan bad faith by setting up a situation in which everything is riding on a few enormous bills. So lawmakers try to hook other priorities — immigration, say, or health care — to “must pass” legislation in hopes of using the leverage to push them through.