ROLL CALL: This Budget Isn’t Dead on Arrival: Trump’s budget draws the battle lines between the parties.

The practical truth is that the president’s budget sets the tone, direction and parameters of the debate over government operations each year. While members of Congress have a stake in making the public and press think that they are in charge of their own constitutional authority to make spending decisions, they tend to follow the course of the president if he is in the same party as the majorities in the House and Senate.

Conservative spending hawks are hailing this budget because they know it is consequential in changing the nature of the debate over the government’s role in American life.

“The people in Washington have mortgages, car payments and bills to pay that depend on government not shrinking,” said Sheila Cole, a former executive director of the Republican Study Committee under then-Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. “Much of America is tired of their sky-is-falling, big-spending mentality. President Trump is tapping into that sentiment.”

Lay off everybody who was declared “nonessential” during the last government shutdown. . . .