Three weeks ago, incoming Senate Budget Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., directed her staff to explore the pros and cons of actually crafting a budget resolution.
Ultimately, Murray judged that a budget was worth doing — a choice other Democratic leaders supported her on. So when House Republicans decided last week to try to force the Senate to pass a spending blueprint for the first time in three years, Democrats were ready to say yes. And on Wednesday, Murray made it official, announcing she would seek to devise a budget and saying the committee is “ready to get to work.”
The timing of Murray’s announcement was also hastened in part by Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Charles E. Schumer of New York, who spilled the beans about Democrats’ plans on TV on Jan. 20. Murray had hesitated, sources say, because the Budget Committee has not officially organized for the new Congress and she is not yet the chairwoman.
In the days before the New Year’s Day fiscal cliff deal, Murray still had not decided whether a formal budget process was the best way to articulate the Democratic Party’s position. She spent much of December in a holding pattern, but on Dec. 13, she had breakfast with the man who will be her foil — House Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin — to discuss the road ahead, her office confirmed.
So when she tasked her staff to weigh the relative benefits of developing a budget, the major question she posed was whether the formal budget process was the best vehicle for Senate Democrats to “aggressively articulate a vision while putting us potentially on a path to bring this fiscal-debt-deficit debate to a close,” one source said.
Some sources familiar with the process said the hammering Democrats have taken for not producing a budget in more than 1,000 days did not factor into the decision, but at least one senior Democratic aide said the GOP barrage was one of three major reasons for Senate Democrats’ change of heart on the matter.
“There are a number of things at play — one is the perception that the ‘Senate Democrats haven’t done a budget in x many days.’[It’s] a clumsy argument but one that people are beginning to gravitate toward,” the aide said. “And there’s an awareness of this as a message Republicans used that gained traction.”
The other major factor, of course, was political. Senate Democratic leaders’ highest priority through 2012 was maintaining their majority as they faced what they and others believed was going to be a bruising election cycle. A budget resolution is a nonbinding measure, and leaders did not want their vulnerable members to unnecessarily cast politically risky votes in the budget “vote-a-rama” that typically accompanies the Senate debate. Plus, they argued, the August 2011 debt limit deal served as an effective budget and had the force of law.
Rep. Bill Cassidy has his blood drawn by Alesha Barbour during a free hepatitis screening in the Rayburn House Office Building hosted by the Congressional Viral Hepatitis Caucus to recognize "National Viral Hepatitis Testing Day."
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