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| A Senate aide delivers a stack of documents bound in red tape being used as a prop during debate on the budget in the Senate, at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, March 22, 2013. The paperwork was described as the federal regulations dealing with the Affordable Care Act, often called "Obamacare." |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senate Democrats neared approval of their first budget proposal in four years on Friday, calling for almost $1 billion in tax increases over the coming decade while sheltering safety net programs targeted by House Republicans. The Democrats also would reverse automatic spending cuts that are beginning to strike both the Pentagon and domestic programs.
The nonbinding but politically
symbolic measure caters to party stalwarts on the liberal edge of the
spectrum just as the House GOP measure is crafted to appeal to more
recent tea party arrivals.
Approval of the
Senate version was expected to come long after dark - after dozens of
votes on amendments, many of which were offered in hopes of inflicting
political damage on Democratic senators up for re-election in
GOP-leaning states like Alaska and Louisiana.
Some
$1 trillion in new revenue would flow to the government over the coming
decade - on top of more than $600 billion in taxes on upper-income
earners approved in January - and would be coupled with a net $875
billion in spending cuts. Those reductions would be generated by modest
cuts to federal health care programs, domestic agencies and the Pentagon
and reduced government borrowing costs. The budget proposes $100
billion in new spending for infrastructure projects and job training
programs.
The president will reveal his own
overdue tax-and-spending plan in two weeks, a plan that will be judged
in part by whether it offers new, more politically risky proposals that
could form the foundation for a bipartisan agreement between the two
houses.
Senators braced for dozens of votes
during a marathon session running late on Friday, with some predicting a
final vote on the Democratic plan in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday. In
early voting Friday morning, Democrats rejected the latest attempt to
repeal Obama's landmark health care law by a strictly party-line vote.
The
Senate has already taken several politically freighted votes, including
a move by Democrats to force a vote on the Paul Ryan House budget,
which was rejected by a 59-40 vote Thursday night, with five Republicans
joining every Democratic senator in opposition.
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.
Additional
votes on Friday could feature forays into off-topic subjects like
super-sized soft drinks, domestic drone strikes, handguns and abortion -
in addition to the more traditional subjects of taxes, spending and
debt.
It all concerned a largely symbolic
measure known as a budget resolution, not binding legislation that could
be sent to the president to become law. The Senate budget measure and
the starkly different version passed by the House on Thursday seek to
set parameters for follow-up legislation on taxes and spending.
The
dueling House and Senate budget plans are anchored on opposite ends of
the ideological spectrum in Washington. No Democrats voted for the House
budget, and not a single Republican will vote for the Senate plan,
written by new Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash. The GOP
plan caters to tea party forces, while Murray was forced to reach out to
liberals, rather than revive proposals such as increasing out-of-pocket
Medicare costs for better off beneficiaries that were discussed when
she co-chaired a failed 2011 deficit "supercommittee."
While
the House GOP plan seeks $4.6 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years
on top of the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts in the same timeframe.
Murray's plan promises to replace the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts,
required under a hard-fought 2011 budget pact because of the failure of
Washington follow up that deal with another deficit-cutting plan. She
notes that they were never intended to take effect and were instead
aimed at forcing Republicans and Democrats into a deal. The nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office warns the $85 billion in cuts set to strike
the economy this year could cost 750,000 jobs.
Murray
combines $975 billion in unspecified tax increases with net cuts in
spending of $875 billion to replace the automatic cuts. The plan
promises a $693 billion deficit in 2014, dropping to the $400 billion
range for the middle years of the decade. While large, such deficits
would hover just above 2 percent of gross domestic product, a level that
many analysts see as economically sustainable.
All
told, the slashing House budget projects $4 trillion more in deficit
cuts than the Murray plan, but only by assuming cuts to Medicaid, food
stamps and farm programs, among others - and cutting domestic agency
spending covering such areas as education, the FBI, NASA and housing
subsidies by almost 20 percent next year.
The
Democratic plan sticks to agency budget "caps" set in the 2011 deal and
leaves safety-net programs for the poor virtually alone. Its cuts to the
rapidly spiraling Medicare program are limited to health care providers
and are less stringent than those proposed by Obama.
"The
Senate budget puts forward serious, responsible deficit reduction that
reflects the recommendations of bipartisan experts, and the values and
priorities of the American people," Murray said.
Senate
Republicans did not draft a budget plan of their own, though 40 of them
voted for the House GOP measure. Instead, they focused their fire on
the Democratic version, saying it does nothing about the rapidly rising
costs of Medicare and other benefit programs, while allowing the
national debt to reach $24.4 trillion by 2023.
"In
addition to having these huge tax increases - the biggest in the
history of the country - this budget also has huge spending," said Sen.
Rob. Portman, R-Ohio. "The spending is actually an increase when you
wipe away all the gimmicks."
