This apparent contradiction confronts Congress as it returns for a grueling month of legislating: The Republicans who run the Capitol, so many of whom came to Washington as avatars of fiscal responsibility, are going to spend the rest of the year working to make a worsening federal balance sheet look even worse.

December holds the potential for a productivity breakthrough, but it also threatens to end in embarrassing deadlock — which is why the clear consensus within the upper reaches of the congressional GOP is that it’s the right time to get comfortable with any feelings of hypocritical guilt.

The party’s acute political need to be seen as starting to make something with their unified government before the dawn of the midterm campaign season, the leadership and President Donald Trump have made plain, will need to take precedence over the demands of the relatively few remaining deficit hawks trying to push the party back toward its traditional core values of balancing budgets and holding the line on borrowing.

And so Job No. 1 for the Republican high command comes with a big dose of irony. They are deploying their once-a-year parliamentary superpowers — the “reconciliation” process created four decades ago to ease passage of tough-love proposals for raising taxes and lowering spending in the cause of shrinking the deficit — for a wholly opposite purpose: Wiping $1.5 trillion in anticipated revenue (at a bare minimum) off the books and threatening to make deficits grow much bigger in the coming decade.

Decoding Reconciliation: Why the Senate Only Needs 50 Votes on Tax Bill