5 Things To Know About The Congressional Budget Fight
As if the federal budget process isn't confusing enough, now we get the fog of partisan war created by the charges and countercharges flying between congressional Democrats and Republicans.
Republicans accuse the Democrats who control the Senate of shirking their duty by not producing "a budget" in recent years; Democrats accuse Republicans of not telling the whole truth.
What's going on? Here are five points to consider.
1) The Budget Control Act
First, it is true that Senate Democrats haven't produced what's called a budget resolution in four years. But they claim they don't actually need to pass what is in reality a nonbinding budget blueprint — and that to have done so in the past two years in particular would have been redundant.
That's because the Budget Control Act of 2011, enacted to solve that summer's debt-ceiling crisis, explicitly said its spending restrictions would take the place of Senate budget resolutions for fiscal years 2012 and 2013.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made that point at a Wednesday news conference in which he asked journalists to stop repeating the Republican line:
"Any comments, any conversation, any statements made by the Republicans about our not having a budget is false. It's untrue. We passed the Budget Control Act. We passed it with the help of Republicans. We didn't have to do a budget. You folks listen to that. Stop taking that bait."