Later today, the House is will vote on the two-year budget resolution negotiated by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, but before that vote, the House must approve the rule under which the vote will come up, and they are now moments away from a vote on that rule.
Democrats will overwhelmingly oppose the rule for considering the budget deal and Republicans will support it. The key dispute over the rule is that Republicans engineered it to make it impossible for Democrats to force a vote on legislation that would extend emergency unemployment benefits. Nonetheless, despite Democratic opposition to the rule, it is likely to pass, setting the final vote on the underlying budget deal for later today. With both Democratic and Republican leadership supporting the deal itself, it is expected to pass.
Democrats and Republicans say they support the deal because it would avoid a fiscal crisis leading to a shutdown and because it rolls back some sequester cuts in exchange for longer-term spending cuts and revenue increases. In all, it boosts spending by $63 billion over the next two years, offset by $86 billion in cuts and revenue hikes over the next ten.
The bottom-line spending figure for FY2014 is $45 billion higher than the House-passed budget and $45 billion lower than the Senate-passed budget, so in a narrow and literal sense it does represent a middle-ground between the two budgets, but that fails to account for the fact that while the House bill was a conservative dream, the Senate bill was a middle-of-the-road compromise. To give you a sense of just how far to the right the deal tilts, it calls for less spending in FY2014 than the budget House Republicans passed last year.
The legislation also fails to deal with emergency unemployment insurance benefits that are set to expire at the end of the year. In addition, it would open up new areas in the Gulf of Mexico to drilling, although Senate Democrats are supportive of that provision. It provides a three-month "doc fix" to prevent cuts in reimbursements to Medicare doctors, which both Democrats and Republicans support, although including the "doc fix" in the legislation without dealing with unemployment insurance reduces Democratic leverage to achieve an extension of benefits.
Although the resolution is expected to pass, Democrats who vote against it will largely focus on the fact that it spends too little and fails to deal with unemployment insurance.
Some Republican right-wingers, meanwhile, will vote against it, saying that they would rather stick with sequester spending levels rather than vote for the budget resolution, even though the resolution would reduce the deficit by more than $20 billion over the next decade. They say they would rather take guaranteed spending cuts now over the promise of more cuts later. Their policy priorities are wrong, but it's actually a reasonable position if the only thing you want to do is to lock in cuts to government spending, because the legislation does increase spending in the short-term. That fact along with the fact that it would avoid a fiscal crisis that could shut down the government is why Democratic leadership and the president support the legislation, even though it fails to address emergency unemployment insurance.
If there are any major developments before the final vote, we'll post them as they occur, and we'll post the results of the final vote when it takes place later today.
11:02 AM PT: The House has begun a series of votes on establishing the rules for consideration of the underlying budget agreement.
11:57 AM PT: The rule was passed by a 226-195 margin. The vote on the underlying budget agreement will take place later in the day.