A few days ago, the Senate and the House each passed budget resolutions. They are large PDF documents that you can read online, the Senate resolution here and the House resolution here. There are differences between the two versions, and removing those differences will necessitate a conference committee. The main reported difference is that the House version looks to pass President Obama's significantly increased health care investment through the "reconciliation" process, which would remove the threat of a Republican filibuster on health care in the Senate. The Senate version lacks such a provision, thus leaving the door open to a Senate Republican filibuster on increased health care investment.
There are, however, other differences. In terms of overall outlays, the Senate budget resolution is roughly $8.1 billion larger than the House resolution. To help describe these differences as accurately as possible, I have broken down the spending differences, by type, in the Senate and House budgets. You can see the entire breakdown here:
Senate vs. House budget Resolutions (PDF)
The primary differences are that the Senate allocates about $6.3 billion for defense, overseas military deployments, and international affairs. By contrast, the House allocates about $8.1 billion extra in outlays for Medicare and Income Security. Most of the remaining difference comes from the "allowances" section, where the House allocates roughly $7.43 billion in outlays than the Senate.
This information presents a major opportunity for effective, progressive activism that can shift between $6-8 billion in military spending in the Senate version toward the $6-8 billion in health care and income security spending in the house version. In addition, there is some very positive transparency language in the Senate version of the bill that is not in the House version because, as I understand it, amendments to the resolution were not allowed in the House. In addition for pushing reconciliation on health care, these would be real, strong, progressive improvements to the budget.
There is, however, one problem: a list of the participants in the budget conference committee is not currently available online. Or, at least, I was unable to find it after an hour of searching this morning. If, in the comments, anyone could supply such a list, it would help us put together an important activist campaign. Additionally, any other difference between the Senate and House budget resolutions would be extremely helpful. Please provide them in the comments.
Update: I have no confirmed that the conferees have not yet been chosen, nor has a conference committee date even been set. So, we are going to have to place the waiting game for now.
Also, note the large, $12 billion difference in transportation between the House and the Senate budget authorities. I'm not sure what this means, especially since the outlays are identical, but it is worth looking into.
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