House rejects Senate Democrats’ budget, with the help of 35 Democrats

3.21.13
by Mary Katharine Ham
Hot Air

Hey, baby steps. They wrote a budget this year, and it earned more votes than all of President Obama’s budgets have earned, combined. And, opposition to Democratic priorities continues to be consistently more bipartisan than the coalition that passed Obamacare.

The House on Wednesday rejected the Senate Democratic budget in a 154-261 vote, with 35 Democrats voting against the blueprint from their upper chamber colleagues.

The Senate Democratic budget was one of three budgets cast aside in a series of votes Wednesday after a debate in which Republicans excoriated President Obama for failing to offer his own budget plan in time for the votes.

House Democrats were instructed to vote for the Senate Democratic budget, but 35 of them defected.

Blue Dog Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) said he voted against the Senate budget because it did not go far enough on entitlements.

“It is not enough entitlement reform in there going forward. It needs to be a more complete and balanced picture and it wasn’t bipartisan in the end of the day,” Schrader told The Hill.

He said he thinks there is an even chance of a deficit grand bargain this summer, but it will not look anything like the House majority or Senate majority budgets.

“Given the fact that none of these bills are going to pass with any bipartisan votes, it begs the question. The president has teed it up. He has talked about entitlement reform–not the Paul Ryan approach–he’s defended some of the tough things in front of the Democrat caucus,” Schrader said.

Among those Democrats voting no, the NRCC’s top targets:

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced earlier this year that Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick and Ron Barber of Arizona, John Barrow of Georgia, Colin Peterson of Minnesota, Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, Jim Matheson of Utah and Nick Rahall of West Virginia are all top pickup opportunities for Republicans in 2014.

Jim Matheson must have heard about this. Find the rest of the wary Dems, here. They may be surprised to learn that they all hate old people and children, or whatever evil it is Democrat Budget Deniers are allegedly guilty of today.

The RNC tweaked Obama today for his priorities— budgets vs. brackets.




I agree with their point on priorities, but they should also be making out brackets of their own, if they know what’s good for them. Like it or not, these are the politics of now.