CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Feb. 24, 2012 – 10:32 p.m.
Ryan Plots Difficult Budget Course
By Paul M. Krawzak, CQ Staff
House Republicans face at least two important challenges in coming weeks as they prepare to write a budget resolution that will serve as a counterpoint to President Obama’s $3.8 trillion tax and spending blueprint for the coming year.
Leaders, including Budget Chairman
Republicans also want to provide cover from Democratic critics who will accuse the GOP of trying to dismantle the federal safety net, in particular the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs.
Because few, if any, Democrats are expected to support Ryan’s budget-writing effort, Republicans have to make the plan credible to the majority of House conservatives in order for it to win adoption. At the same time, the GOP wants to cast its proposals in a way that will make it difficult for Democrats to characterize them as too extreme.
House leaders are determined to bring a budget resolution to the floor before the end of March so it can be adopted before the April 15 statutory deadline. Because the House is scheduled to be in recess the first two weeks of April, the Budget Committee is likely to mark up the resolution in the third week of March. A floor vote would be planned for the end of that month.
Changes to Medicare Plan Likely
This year’s House budget resolution is expected to be similar to Ryan’s proposal from last year (
That blueprint included trillions of dollars’ worth of spending cuts, a restructuring of federal health care programs and a call to simplify the tax system.
Ryan, R-Wis., is likely to incorporate some changes this year, possibly including a somewhat different approach to overhauling Medicare that he has proposed with Oregon Democratic Sen.
Ryan said earlier this month that he did not know what shape a Medicare plan might take in his budget, since it has not been written yet and he is seeking collaboration from members of his committee.
But some lawmakers and others who are close to the committee, including Rep.
Ryan has made clear he is seeking Democratic backing for changes in Medicare that he says are essential to prevent entitlement spending from growing beyond the ability of the government to support those programs in the future.
The Medicare plan was a central reason Democrats lambasted Ryan’s budget last year, and they see an opening to do so again this year, particularly in an effort to score points in an election year.
Ryan Plots Difficult Budget Course
“What we’re trying to do is advance the idea, to plant the seeds to reap a bipartisan solution after the elections,” Ryan said at a Feb. 16 breakfast with reporters. “We know it’s not going to happen before.”
The Ryan-Wyden proposal is similar to last year’s budget in that it relies on an approach called premium support to curb the program’s rapidly growing cost.
A premium support system would give beneficiaries a voucher-like allocation that they would use to buy a health care plan on a competitive exchange. Under Ryan-Wyden, beneficiaries would have the additional option of choosing to remain in a fee-for-service type of plan, similar to traditional Medicare, but still under the premium support financing umbrella.
“This is the big budget issue,” Ryan told reporters. “It’s better to have a system where the beneficiary is the driver and the decision maker, where she gets to decide among competing providers for her benefit.”
Political observers and congressional aides who spoke on background said the Ryan-Wyden plan would provide some “inoculation” against charges that Republicans are bent on destroying Medicare, because they could say the plan has Democratic support.
But in an interview last week, Rep.
Van Hollen said Democrats on the committee would offer their own budget resolution, focusing on short-term job creation and long-term deficit reduction along the lines of the president’s budget.
Lower Spending Caps
It is possible the House Republican budget will propose lower discretionary spending caps than the statutory limits in the August debt limit law (PL 112-25). Observers said lower caps would both yield greater deficit reduction and draw support from conservative GOP lawmakers who have opposed recent spending proposals for being overly generous.
Sixty-six House Republicans voted against the debt limit law, some because the legislation set a fiscal 2012 spending cap that was $24 billion higher than in the budget resolution.
Under the debt limit law, the spending cap for fiscal 2013 is $1.047 trillion, about $4 billion higher than the fiscal 2012 limit.
GOP leaders will probably need to pick up a majority of those defectors to adopt the fiscal 2013 budget. And lowering the discretionary cap might be one way to do that. Another way might be to find additional savings from entitlement programs.
Democrats would be sure to complain if Republicans try to replace the negotiated caps set in the debt limit law. And lowering the caps would present special difficulties. House appropriators would have to construct spending bills based on the lower caps, with a high likelihood that they would be raised again in negotiations with the Democratic Senate.
Ryan Plots Difficult Budget Course
In that sense, any House budget resolution will be largely a symbolic exercise, because the Senate is all but sure to refuse to adopt it. Senate Majority Leader
Still, one analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation said a House budget would have value even if it does not go beyond that chamber.
“Ryan’s budget has laid down a whole number of ideas about the direction things should be going — his Medicare premium support being one of the main ones,” said Patrick Louis Knudsen, a senior fellow in federal budgetary affairs at Heritage. “I don’t think those ideas go away. Especially if he reinforces them in his next budget resolution, they stay in the picture.”
The full Senate hasn’t voted on a budget resolution since 2009, and the Senate Budget Committee did not consider a budget last year, something that has been a source of GOP criticism.
Senate Budget Chairman