Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., has moved to implement the budget proposed by President Obama, which failed to receive a single vote in Congress and violates the current law on spending limits, according to Senate Republicans.
“We have Members of Congress that take it as a personal challenge to see how they can defeat, get around, and spend more money than they’re allocated,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said on the Senate floor this afternoon. “The American people are being misled in this attempt. We’re not following the Budget Control Act.”
Sessions was referring to his discovery that the fiscal year 2013 spending levels that Conrad filed with the Congressional Record exceed the cap on spending set by current law.
“The filed outlay aggregate for fiscal year 2013 is not consistent with CBO’s baseline but, instead, appears to reflect the higher outley level for discretionary spending in the President’s budget request (as estimated by the CBO),” Sessions, the Ranking Member on the Senate Budget Committee, wrote in a letter to Conrad today. “The President’s budget was voted down unanimously by the Senate.”
The spending level filed by Conrad flouts the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011 — the law passed at the end of the debt ceiling fight last year — is $14 billion higher than current law allows, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates, according to Sessions.
Obama’s budget failed the House by a vote of 414-0 on March 29, 2012. His budget failed in the Senate by another unanimous vote of 99-0. For the third year in a row, Senate Democrats chose not to produce a budget of their own, despite a legal obligation to do so.
“I request that you review your allocations and re-file the enforceable levels and related committee allocations at amounts that are consistent with CBO’s March 2012 baseline, as required by the BCA,” Sessions concluded in his letter.
