House votes to keep government funded

Spending bill awaits Obama’s signature

House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that the budget path ahead is rocky, as the House and Senate plans are so far apart.
House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that the budget path ahead is rocky, as the House and Senate plans are so far apart.

WASHINGTON - The House on Thursday voted to keep the government running for the next six months while pushing through a Tea Party-influenced budget for next year that would shrink the government by another $4.6 trillion over the next decade.

The spending authorization on its way to the White House for President Barack Obama’s signature leaves in place $85 billion in spending cuts to the Pentagon and domestic programs. The result will be temporary furloughs for hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors over the next six months and interrupted, slower or halted services and aid for many Americans.

The nonbinding GOP budget plan for 2014 and beyond calls for a balanced budget in 10 years’ time and sharp cuts in safety-net programs for the poor and other domestic programs.

The GOP budget proposal, similar to previous plans offered by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., aims to balance the budget within a decade without raising taxes. But to do so Ryan, his party’s vice-presidential nominee last year, assumes cuts that would force millions from programs for the poor such as food stamps and Medicaid and shear almost 20 percent from domestic-agency budget levels assumed less than two years ago.

To make spending align with revenue, the plan assumes the current level of taxes will continue, even as it repeals the tax increases in the president’s health-care law and eliminates the alternative minimum tax. The plan directs the tax writers on the House Ways and Means Committee to overhaul the tax code, leaving only two tax brackets, 25 percent and 10 percent, as well as a 25 percent corporate tax rate, down from 35 percent.

But the budget does not detail the tax deductions, credits and provisions that would need to be eliminated or cut back to finance such tax-rate reductions, effectively leaving tax writers a $6 trillion hole to fill - one that Democrats say is mathematically impossible without raising the tax burden of the middle class.

Ryan’s plan passed the House on a mostly party-line 221-207 vote, with 10 Republicans joining Democrats against it.

Each of Arkansas’ four GOP House members voted for the plan except for Rep. Rick Crawford of Jonesboro.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Senate debated for a second day its first budget since the 2009 plan that helped Obama pass his healthcare law. A vote on the Senate measure is expected late today or early Saturday.

The Senate cast several tallies Thursday night, including a move by Democrats to force a vote on the Ryan budget, which was defeated 59-40, with five Republicans - including Tea Party stalwarts Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah - joining every Democrat in opposition.

Republican John Boozman of Arkansas supported the Ryan plan, but Democrat Mark Pryor opposed it.

Republicans countered with a move by Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., putting Democrats on record in opposition to balancing the budget by the end of the decade. It failed on a near party-line vote.

But the Senate gave bipartisan approval to a proposal by Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., to put senators on record in favor of repealing a $30 billion tax over 10 years on medical devices enacted to help pay for Obama’s health-care bill. Boozman and Pryor voted for the proposal.

The dueling House and Senate budget plans are anchored on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum in Washington. The GOP plan caters to Tea Party forces while Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., crafted a measure designed to nail down support from liberal senators such as Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who vehemently oppose cuts to safety-net programs, such as Medicare and Social Security.

The sharp contrast over the 2014 budget and beyond came as the House cleared away last year’s unfinished fiscal business - a government wide bill to keep Cabinet agencies running through the 2013 budget year, which ends Sept. 30.

The House passed the bipartisan 2013 measure by a 318-109 vote. Crawford was the only Arkansan to vote against it; the other three Republicans voted yes.

The Senate had approved the measure Wednesday.

The measure would authorize money for the day-to-day operations of every Cabinet agency through Sept. 30, provide another $87 billion to fund overseas military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and maintain a pay freeze for federal workers. Automatic spending cuts of 5 percent to domestic programs and 8 percent to the Pentagon are left in place, leaving hundreds of thousands of federal workers facing job furloughs.

The stopgap bill eases the effect of the trims on food inspections and college assistance for active-duty members of the military and relieves the Pentagon from a cash crunch in accounts for training and readiness. Veterans health programs will get their scheduled increases, and there are big boosts to modernize the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal. It also ensures full funding for a food program for pregnant women and their babies.

In a related development, the Defense Department said Thursday that it is delaying planned furlough notices to almost 800,000 civilian employees while officials analyze whether the stopgap budget Congress passed can avert some days of unpaid leave.

Federal agencies have thus far borne the brunt of the spending cuts hammered out in a 2011 budget pact that set spending caps and increased the government’s borrowing limit. Congress’ failure to follow up with another deficit bargain set the automatic spending cuts in motion. Republicans insist the cuts remain in place until Democrats agree to cuts to rapidly growing entitlement programs.

But Democrats were denied additional money to implement Obama’s signature first-term accomplishments on overhauling the health-care system and tightening regulation of Wall Street.

The long-term, nonbinding GOP budget plan drafted by Ryan makes promises about overhauling costly benefits programs such as food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, but it’s often scant on details about the cuts.

The Ryan measure also revives a plan to turn the Medicare programs for the elderly into a voucherlike system for future beneficiaries born in 1959 or later. Critics say the idea would mean ever-spiraling out-of-pocket costs for care, but Ryan insists the plan would inject competition into a broken system.

“This is an uncompromising, ideological approach to our budget issues,” said the Budget Committee’s top Democrat, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. “The American people voted, and they resoundingly rejected the approach that is now taken, once again, for the third year in a row, in this Republican budget.”

In the Senate, Murray’s plan would add nearly $1 trillion in taxes over the coming decade in an attempt to stabilize the $16 trillion-plus national debt.

Murray’s plan would actually increase government spending - measured against a base line that already assumes automatic budget increases - after accounting for the $1.2 trillion cost of repealing the automatic cuts.That means the net cuts to the deficit would amount to just a few hundred billion dollars in a federal budget estimated at $46 trillion or so over the coming decade. Murray’s position is that the automatic cuts were designed to prod Washington into action on the debt and were never intended to take effect. By that math her budget promises $1.85 trillion in lower deficits after 10 years.

“We need to tackle our deficit and debt fairly and responsibly,” Murray said. “We need to keep the promises we’ve made as a nation to our seniors, our families and our communities.”

Ryan said comparison of his budget and the Democratic version “clarifies the divide between us.”

“We want to balance the budget. They don’t,” he said Thursday. “We want to restrain spending. They want to spend more.”

“We offer modernization, reform, growth and opportunity,” he continued. “They want to cling to the status quo, more taxing, more spending, more borrowing.”

Arkansas’ Crawford, who has unsuccessfully attempted to push a balanced-budget amendment, said that the vote on the Ryan plan was only a “sugar high” of temporary deficit reduction unless it is coupled with binding legislation.

Crawford said he bucked his party “to bring attention to Congress’ continued reliance on policies that have clearly failed and to call on my colleagues to focus instead on passing permanent spending controls.”

Rep. Tim Griffin of Little Rock said the Ryan budget would simply slow the rate of growth of federal spending, rather than making drastic cuts.

“The Ryan budget does not cut one penny of spending overall,” he said. “It simply grows the budget less than the Democrats want to.”

Rep. Tom Cotton of Dardanelle praised Ryan’s blueprint for attempting to balance the federal budget in 10 years, half the time than the budget chairman envisioned in past proposals.

“It’s bolder than past budgets,” Cotton said. “A balanced budget is essential for economic growth.”

Rep. Steve Womack of Rogers said that if families in his district can balance their household ledgers, Congress should be expected to do the same with the federal budget.

“Washington’s spending is out of control, and the House budget is an important step to get ourselves back in check,” he said.

Once the Senate blueprint is passed, lawmakers will return from their spring recess in April and try to resolve the vastly different visions of taxing and spending that the House and Senate will have enacted.

If they can, the two chambers’ appropriations and tax-writing committees will go to work on the legislation needed to turn those broad blueprints into legislative reality. If they can’t, the House and Senate may slide back toward more budget brinkmanship, first in July when Congress must raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit, then in September, when lawmakers must come together on a spending plan for the next fiscal year.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, acknowledged Thursday that the path ahead is murky. Republicans are demanding overhauls to reduce entitlement spending in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling - a position Democrats object to unless large tax revenue is included beyond the more than $600 billion in tax increases approved New Year’s Day.

“At this point in time, I don’t know how we go forward,” Boehner told reporters. Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Taylor of The Associated Press; by Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times; by Lisa Rein, Rosalind S. Helderman and Paul Kane of The Washington Post; and by Alex Daniels of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/22/2013

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