House OKs plan that’s doomed

WASHINGTON -- A divided House approved a $3.6 trillion Republican budget Thursday recasting Medicare and imposing cuts in domestic programs, capping a battle that gave both political parties a campaign-season stage to spotlight warring deficit-cutting priorities.

But the partisan divisions over the measure, which is dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate, also underscores how tough it will be for lawmakers to achieve the cooperation needed to contend with a tsunami of tax and spending decisions that will engulf Congress right after this fall's elections.

"This is very easy," Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates debt reduction, said of House passage of a budget that will go no further. "When you get to the budget bomb at the end of the year, it's for real. You're going to actually have to pass something."

The fiscal plan the House passed Thursday by a near party-line 228-191 vote would reshape and squeeze savings out of Medicare and Medicaid, the federal health insurance programs for the elderly and poor. It would force cuts in a wide range of spending, including rail projects, research and Pell Grants for low-income college students.

It would block President Barack Obama's plans to raise taxes on couples earning above $250,000 a year. Instead, it would collapse the current six income tax rates into two, with a top rate of 25 percent -- well below the current 35 percent ceiling -- while erasing tax deductions and other breaks that the GOP plan failed to specify.

Overall, the GOP budget would cut spending $5.3 trillion more deeply over the next decade than Obama would -- out of more than $40 trillion that would be spent. It would cut taxes by $2 trillion more than Obama's plan. That leaves Republicans seeking a hefty $3.3 trillion in deeper deficit reduction than Obama.

Nevada's three House members voted along party lines. Republican Reps. Joe Heck and Mark Amodei voted for the GOP budget, and Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley voted against it.

The measure became grist for the presidential campaign.

"House Republicans today banded together to shower millionaires and billionaires with a massive tax cut paid for by ending Medicare as we know it and making extremely deep cuts to critical programs needed to create jobs and strengthen the middle class," White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.

GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney issued his own statement. "The House budget and my own plan share the same path forward: pro-growth tax cuts, getting federal spending under control and strengthening entitlement programs for future generations," Romney said.

There is little practical consequence if Congress' budget is ignored or, like this year, if a final version is never approved. The budget is a nonbinding blueprint that legislators are supposed to follow as they work on spending and revenue bills later in the year but don't really have to.

Come January, though, a series of fiscal events will occur almost simultaneously that lawmakers and the new president will have to confront and agree to do something about, one way or another.

Tax cuts first approved under President George W. Bush will expire, imposing tax increases on nearly every working American. Billions of dollars in spending cuts to defense and domestic programs, triggered by the failure of Congress' debt-cutting supercommittee, will start taking effect unless blocked.

Right about then, the government should hit its debt limit and need renewed borrowing authority to avoid a default. A new limit will be required from lawmakers who fought right to the brink in a similar battle last summer.

Congressional gridlock on spending bills may threaten a federal shutdown. And a payroll tax cut, extra unemployment benefits and a host of temporary tax breaks for businesses will all be about to expire.

"You've got a budget just about to blow up. There's never been anything like this," Bixby said