Senate Democrats have issued the opening salvo in an effort to consolidate the victories they achieved in last week’s budget and debt-limit deal, accusing new House speaker Paul Ryan of flirting with the idea of a government shutdown in December.

“Let’s build on that bipartisan foundation we built with that budget deal,” Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.) told reporters yesterday. “It will be up to Republicans to push the Tea Party aside again.”

That means winning a fight about what to do with the spending increases approved in the budget agreement. Lawmakers have to pass twelve appropriations bills funding the various departments of the federal government before December 11; if they don’t, the government shuts down.

Ryan broke with Boehner’s repeated pledges to avoid such a shutdown on Tuesday morning. “We have a tough deadline — December 11 — we’ve got not a lot of time between now and then, so we’re going to have to put together appropriations,” he said. “But this is the legislative branch and the power of the purse rests within the legislative branch and we fully expect that we’re going to exercise that power.”

Senate minority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and his colleagues seized on Ryan’s remarks, accusing him of a willingness to shut down the government. But in the midst of their attacks, Democrats acknowledged that Ryan might claw back some of the concessions Republicans made in the deal that Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) dubbed “the great John Boehner farewell.”

#share#Reid and company faulted Ryan for raising the specter of attaching “poison-pill” provisions — conservative proposals likely to provoke a presidential veto and raise the possibility of a shutdown — to the next funding bill. But they seem just as concerned that he might use the coming appropriations process to break the agreement that Boehner made. They fret that Republicans could pass the defense-appropriations bill they were promised as part of the deal, but then refuse to pass the non-defense appropriations bills that Democrats were promised in exchange. As a hedge against such a scenario, they’re demanding that the twelve spending bills be consolidated into an omnibus package.

“Remember: They’re not required by law to meet the agreement,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader-in-waiting, told reporters. “That’s a budget agreement. . . . We need to negotiate an omnibus all at once and all together.”

#related#Thus, Democrats are in the position of demanding an irregular means of funding the government — an omnibus spending bill, which combines all twelve appropriations bills into a single legislative package — that includes none of the policy proposals favored by the Republican majorities in both chambers. To pull that off, they’ll need the implicit threat of a filibuster that would trigger a government shutdown, something Reid hesitates to make explicit.

“I am confident that if we move and if Republicans work with us to get an omnibus bill done, I think that we can work out the poison-[pill] riders that they’ve been talking about,” he says when asked if Democrats are prepared to carry out such a filibuster. “I’m not going to speculate. I don’t know what you’re talking about. . . . They know they can’t have dozens of riders.”

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.