House Republican budget crosses finish line, barely

[March 26, 2015]  By David Lawder
 
 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Overcoming internal divisions on defense spending, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday narrowly approved a non-binding federal budget plan calling for $5.5 trillion in domestic spending cuts over 10 years.

The vote meant that House Speaker John Boehner avoided what could have been another embarrassing rebuke from his party's right flank. Instead, a complex series of votes engineered by Boehner succeeded and moved the budget issue to the Senate.

Voting there on a similarly non-binding resolution was expected on Thursday. The two chambers' spending blueprints will not become law, but they will likely influence later bills in the budget process and political campaigns.

The Republican-controlled Congress will face a series of tax-and-spending challenges this year, each one testing its ability to get things done since Republicans won full control of Capitol Hill in November's elections.

In the House, Republicans were divided over military spending. Fiscal conservatives who wanted to maintain statutory spending caps had argued for weeks with defense hawks who wanted more money for the military to deal with growing global threats.

Boehner allowed six budget options to come to the floor, including two versions of the House Budget Committee's plan, allowing members to lodge protest votes against provisions they opposed. In the unusual series of runoff votes under "Queen of the Hill" parliamentary rules, Boehner's favored version prevailed by an extremely thin margin, 219-208.

A subsequent 228-199 vote on final passage showed some Republicans who initially opposed Boehner's favored option later flipped their votes to vote for it. All Democrats voted no.

MORE DEFENSE SPENDING NOT OFFSET

The winning budget proposes to add $38 billion to an off-budget war funding account above the amount requested by President Barack Obama without any offsetting savings.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry said the added war funding was a placeholder for future negotiations to ease "sequester" budget constraints enacted in 2011.

"I'd like to remove the cap on defense spending because it turns out there is no cap on the dangers we are facing around the world," he said.

The House voted 132-294 to reject a more extreme budget that had been proposed by the Republican Study Committee, a conservative group. It would have slashed domestic spending by $7.1 trillion over 10 years, including cuts to the Social Security pension program for seniors, which was largely untouched in the Budget Committee's versions.

Republicans regard passage of a budget as important because it would let them use "reconciliation" budget rules.

Under these rules, only a simple majority of Republicans in the 100-member Senate is needed to pass certain measures, which could help the party advance other items, such as repealing or replacing Obama's health care reform law, later this year.

(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Leslie Adler and Ken Wills)

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