Republicans Push Democrats To Submit A Budget... and Get One To The Left Of Obama

(EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS)

Wonkbook: What we learned from the Senate Democrats’ budget

By Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas, Published: March 25 

Shortly before 5 a.m. on Saturday, Senate Democrats passed a budget for the first time in four years.

This fulfills a key demand of Republicans, who’d come to view the Senate Democrats’ failure to pass a budget as one of the key impediments to a fiscal deal. Remember that forcing Senate Democrats to pass a budget was the deliverable that persuaded House Republicans to sign onto a three-month delay of the debt ceiling. They cared about the Senate’s budget that much.

And now that they’ve got a budget? When Rep. Paul Ryan, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, saw the document, he said, “Their budget never balances—ever. It simply takes more from hardworking families to spend more in Washington. It ignores the drivers of our debt. It continues the raid on Medicare. And it imperils the health and retirement security our seniors need.”

When the budget passed, Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said, “The Democratic Caucus has produced a budget here that won’t work. It does not meet the challenge of our time.”

So Senate Democrats have passed a budget, and here’s what we’ve learned: Republicans and Democrats still don’t agree on what to do with the budget. Shocking, I know.

If there was a surprise in the Senate Democrats’ budget, it’s that Harry Reid and Patty Murray got so many of their colleagues to sign onto a framework, however vague, that sits to the left of the deal President Obama is currently offering the Republicans.

A key thread of the past few years is that the White House has believed Senate Democrats have little spine on taxes. In fact, quite a bit of the White House’s negotiating strategy has been driven by the worry that in a crisis situation, Senate Democrats would take a deal with very little revenue, undercutting the White House’s leverage.

This was also part of why Republicans were so eager to see Senate Democrats produce a budget. One of the working theories was that conservative Senate Democrats couldn’t possibly support the administration’s approach, and the deep fissures in the party were being papered over by Reid’s refusal to actually release a budget. If Senate Democrats had to release a budget, the uneasy consensus would crack, and the moderate rejection of Obama’s radical priorities would be clear for all to see.

On Friday, however, Senate Democrats stood up and voted for almost a trillion dollars more in tax hikes — and that’s on top of the tax hikes in the fiscal cliff deal. That’s about $375 billion more in tax increases than even Obama has been asking for lately. Republicans always said Senate Democrats needed to show the American people where they stand on the budget, and now, they have. To the GOP’s disappointment, it’s to the left of Obama, and far from them.

The budget also gave the Senate as a whole an opportunity to show where they stood on issues ranging from too-big-to-fail (against) to Obamacare’s medical device tax (against) to the Keystone XL Pipeline (for). Suzy Khimm has the full list of amendments here.

Wonkbook’s Numbers of the Day: 80 and 44. The first is the percentage of Americans between the age of 18 to 29, and the second of those older than 65, who support gay marriage.