After a rocky start to the new Congress, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives will face their next big test on Wednesday as the chamber prepares to vote on two competing budgets.
In a move to appease both fiscal conservatives and defense hawks in the party, GOP leaders have decided to invoke a parliamentary tactic that would ensure a budget resolution is adopted while still allowing members to vote for the plan of their choice. Whichever proposal gets the most votes will be considered the House GOP’s budget for the fiscal year 2016.
One budget was approved by the House budget committee last week and is favored by the fiscal conservatives for adhering to the spending caps triggered in 2013 by federal budget cuts known as “sequestration”. Defense hawks balked at that proposal and are poised to vote for a separate budget, which includes an additional $20bn in defense spending.
Republican leaders are hopeful that enough conservatives will cross over and support the higher defense number.
“I believe in the higher [defense] numbers – the budget that we’ll pass,” John Boehner, the House speaker, told reporters on Tuesday. “I think that the way we’re considering all of these budgets – both Democrat and Republican budgets – is frankly the most democratic way you can consider it … I think that’s a great way to do it.”
The stakes are particularly high for GOP leaders in the House, who in recent weeks faced a number of embarrassing votes that called into question their prowess over the Republican caucus. Last month, a plan to use funding for the Department of Homeland Security to try to block Barack Obama’s immigration actions failed in dramatic fashion. Prior to that, a vote on a 20-week abortion ban was scrapped after a faction of Republicans took issue with the bill’s narrow exception for rape.
The setbacks renewed the narrative of fractures within the GOP and led some rank-and-file members to grow skeptical of the vote-tallying capabilities of Steve Scalise, the Republican whip.
Scalise, a representative from Louisiana, defended his record on Tuesday when a reporter raised the question at a press conference. “Our whip counts have never been off on the floor,” he said.
The Senate is preparing to advance its own budget, which was also amended to include more defense spending through the Pentagon’s contingency war account. But hawks such as Arizona senator John McCain have criticized that approach, dubbing it a “slush fund”, and called for eliminating the sequester-induced defense limit altogether.
Meanwhile, Obama and Democrats have assailed Republicans for focusing only on defense spending while cutting funding for social welfare programs. Obama has said he will reject any budget that does not lift spending caps on both defense and domestic spending, teeing up an even larger battle ahead.
