The Republican-controlled Congress passed important checkmarks this week, with the Senate joining the House early Friday morning in passing a budget resolution.
Now the party faces a new test, with a deadline on tax day, April 15: Reconciling the House and Senate versions of the budget.
In doing so, they will have to navigate their differences on a few politically tricky items.
In particular, they will have to agree on war spending and bridge the big difference between the House and Senate budgets on the size of cuts to non-defense discretionary spending.
Even if they get past that stage, the budget resolution does not become law and is not signed by the president. It only sets targets for appropriations bills that would have to be passed later in the year.
But there are two major reasons for Republicans to aim for the finish line on a budget resolution: The first is being able to say the Republican Congress voted for a balanced budget. The second is to unlock the budgetary tool known as reconciliation, which would allow Republicans to send legislation to President Obama’s desk with only 51 votes in the Senate.
“This has been an important week for the Senate as we’ve worked to set spending goals for our nation,” said Sen. Mike Enzi Thursday on the Senate floor, just before the Senate kicked off a taxing marathon of votes on amendments to the budget. The torrent of amendments, a rare event known as a vote-o-rama, pushed final passage of the budget early into Friday morning. As chairman of the Budget Committee that wrote the budget blueprint, Enzi was responsible for managing the floor action.
“Before this year, the Senate has only been able to pass two budgets in the past six years. Now that Congress is under new management, we’re on track to pass a budget after only three months,” the Wyoming Republican boasted. “We want to get a budget passed by April 15th so that the spending committees can get busy looking at the specific areas that they’re in charge of.”
Getting there will involve staff members working between now and April 15, through the congressional recess and Easter weekend, to address the differences between Enzi’s budget and the one written by House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia.
Those staff members will put put the two budgets side by side and negotiate over the differences in spending.
“I think the fundamental questions are going to be: What are we going to do about defense, and what are we going to do about non-defense?” said Steve Bell, the director of Economic Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Committee and a former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.
The two Republican budgets followed a similar blueprint: Balance within 10 years without raising taxes by repealing Obamacare and implementing steep reductions on planned spending on Medicaid and safety net programs.
But there has been significant disagreement between fiscal conservatives and defense hawks over the spending caps holding Pentagon funding to $523 billion in fiscal 2016.
The House-passed budget skirted the issue by dedicating $96 billion to a war funding account not subject to the caps — a plan for defense spending criticized as a “gimmick” using a “slush fund” by Democrats. An amendment to the Senate budget by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., does much the same thing.
But hawks will have to defend that maneuver to both fiscal conservatives and Democrats in the conference.
Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the defense hawks in the upper chamber, saw his own amendment to break the cap and boost Pentagon funding to $661 billion in fiscal 2016 defeated Thursday, but nevertheless suggested he supported the budget headed for passage.
“I never conditioned my vote on the budget on my one specific amendment,” the Florida Republican said in the Capitol. Noting other efforts to increase funding later in the process, he said that he would have to wait to see how it “played out.”
“I think the number one obligation of the federal government is to fund defense first,” said Rubio, a potential presidential candidate.
Perhaps a bigger obstacle than defense funding, though, might be differences between the two budgets on non-defense discretionary spending, which is the other category of spending subject to the statutory caps imposed by the Budget Control Act.
Non-defense discretionary spending accounts for all programs funded by Congress outside of the Pentagon, for everything from job training to scientific research.
The House budget plans to cut that category of spending, which is already at the lowest level in decades, by $760 billion over the next 10 years, down to $4.7 trillion total.
The Senate budget, on the other hand, would lower it by less than $100 billion.
The conference committee also will have to hammer out differences in the level of funding for Medicare and Medicaid, but those are just “minor things” relative to the GOP differences on discretionary spending, Bell said.
Differences in policy won’t make a difference. For example, the House version of the budget includes the plan, originally introduced by former Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, to overhaul Medicare by giving seniors a subsidy that they can apply toward private plans or traditional Medicare. Senate Republicans avoided that politically sensitive measure in their plan. But as long as they agree on planned funding levels for Medicare, they do not need to agree on the policies to get there.
