By Frances Symes, CQ Staff

Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad is offering a long-term deficit reduction plan at what he is calling a markup Wednesday, but the more immediate effect of his action will be to spare Democrats potentially difficult election year votes on spending priorities.

The North Dakota Democrat plans to offer his budget resolution without a final vote or possible amendments. Instead, Conrad hopes the plan modeled on recommendations from the president’s 2010 fiscal commission will jump-start negotiations on a bipartisan agreement in the committee while remaining outside the rancor that has surrounded budget debates in Congress.

Avoiding a vote also allows Conrad to meet the concerns of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has insisted he will not bring a budget to the floor.

Conrad said his decision to put forward a “bipartisan” proposal will “disappoint some on both sides of the aisle.” But Conrad, who served on the fiscal commission and has since advocated for a comprehensive, balanced deficit reduction plan as a member of the bipartisan Gang of Six, said he is “not interested in furthering the political divide” by putting forward a partisan plan.

Having a markup without a vote, however, didn’t appear to close any divisions between Democrats and Republicans.

Although several panel Democrats expressed support for Conrad’s move on Tuesday, Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, said he was “very surprised” by the chairman’s decision not to allow amendments or votes on his budget proposal. Sessions said he doesn’t think the panel meeting Wednesday “can be called a markup — maybe you could say it is the beginning of one.”

Reid expressed broad support for Conrad, but he would not discuss the plan itself or the role it may play in future negotiations. “No one in the Congress — no one in the Congress — understands the fiscal problems of this country more than Kent Conrad. But as to specific questions about what he’s doing, ask him,” he said.

Reid says the Senate does not need a budget resolution because last year’s debt deal (PL 112-25) set an overall spending cap for fiscal 2013. Conrad echoed Reid’s argument, pointing to the section of the debt law that says the discretionary spending levels it sets “shall apply in the Senate in the same manner as for a concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal 2013.”

Matter of Timing

The budget Conrad will present to his committee on Wednesday proposes $5.4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years, including the spending cuts already enacted. It includes an overhaul of the tax code that would raise revenue, as well as additional changes to entitlement programs.

The proposal is sure to garner criticism from both sides of the aisle, just as the deficit commission’s plan did when it was released in December 2010. That plan got 11 votes of the 18-member panel, short of the 14-vote threshold needed to send it to Congress. An attempt to advance a budget alternative based on the commission’s framework, commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles plan after its co-chairmen — Erskine Bowles, former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, a former Republican senator — gained only 38 “yes” votes in the House in March.

Conrad said Tuesday the overwhelming vote against the framework in the House had helped convince him the “timing is not yet right” for a vote on the plan in the Senate. Rather, Conrad said, he hopes his proposal will spur negotiations on a long-term spending plan aimed at reducing the deficit before a series of major tax and spending decisions after the election.

“What becomes very clear is how long it takes to do this work,” he said. “It is important that we begin.”