Push Agenda

In Control, Republican Lawmakers See Budget as Way to Push Agenda

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

Next year, House Republicans will try again to transform Medicare and Medicaid, repeal the Affordable Care Act, shrink domestic spending and substantially cut the highest tax rates through the budget process. Then they will leave it to the new Senate Republican majority to decide how far to press the party’s small-government vision, senior House aides said this week.

House Republican officials said the first budget blueprint of the 114th Congress will not stray far from the plans drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and the departing Budget Committee chairman. Those plans, passed along party lines three times since Republicans took control of the House in 2011, were never going anywhere with the Senate in Democratic hands.

With this month’s Republican sweep in the midterm elections, the stakes have changed.

“They’re firing with real budget bullets,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. “Real people will get hurt.”

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, a Budget Committee member, said Tuesday that House and Senate Republicans dealing with the budget would “try and coordinate as much as possible,” and “hew to some basic principles,” the first being achieving a balanced budget in 10 years.

Congressional Republicans intend to present a plan to overhaul Medicare, calling for voucherlike “premium supports” to steer people 65 and over into buying commercial health insurance, and to transform Medicaid, which would be cut and turned into block grants to state governments. They also intend to set up a new commission to study options on Social Security, while relying on what one House Republican aide called “the solid foundation” of the Ryan budget plan.

The fate of the effort will rest in the new Republican Senate. The incoming Senate Budget Committee chairman, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, has been a staunch defender of the Ryan plans, but after a speech Wednesday on Capitol Hill, the senator sounded a cautious note, suggesting he would not approach his new post the way Mr. Ryan has.

He called it “an overreach” to think the Senate Budget Committee would dictate the terms of an overhaul of the tax code, Medicare or other programs that drive the budget deficit.

“Congressman Ryan of the Budget Committee last year, really over the past several years, really used that position to advance his views about how Medicare ought to be fixed, and I thought they were very valuable and very thoughtful,” he said. But, he added, that is not likely to be his approach.

Beyond the Senate Budget Committee, the House’s plans will immediately test the skills of the prospective Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, in balancing conservatives against moderate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine and Republicans seeking re-election in Democratic states.

For his part, President Obama has other plans. The deficit has fallen from $1.4 trillion in 2009 — or nearly 10 percent of the economy then — to $483 billion, or 2.8 percent of the economy, in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Measured against the economy, the deficit is now below the average over the last 40 years, and as long as the debt continues to fall relative to the economy, Mr. Obama appears to be more concerned about other economic matters.

The White House is sticking to its principle that any deficit reduction has to include tax increases to soften budget cuts, and that no belt-tightening should be undertaken that would jeopardize the economic growth just now picking up momentum.

The president’s real economic policy emphasis will be a broad overhaul of the corporate tax code to free up revenues for long-term spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects. Mr. Van Hollen said Democrats would not bend in their opposition to spending cuts that they say would be largely used to cut taxes for the rich.

And, Mr. Van Hollen said, those arguments will have resonance once Americans realize the fight has moved from symbolic to real.

The Ryan budget faced a vote in the Senate in 2013, and five Republicans voted against it: Ms. Collins; Dean Heller, a moderate-leaning Nevadan; Mike Lee of Utah; Rand Paul of Kentucky; and Ted Cruz of Texas, who saw the plan as too timid. It failed on an advisory vote, 40 to 59.

On the other hand, four Republican newcomers to the Senate — Representatives Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Steve Daines of Montana, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Cory Gardner of Colorado — are already on the record supporting the Ryan approach, with a fifth, Representative Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, in a runoff for the last outstanding Senate seat.

“There’s going to be a strong commitment to get a budget done for no other reason than they’ve made such a big deal about the other side failing,” said Hazen Marshall, a former Senate Budget Committee staff director who has been consulting with the incoming committee leadership. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. At the end of the day, you’ve got to get a majority.”

The budget, one of Congress’s first orders of business, sets top-line spending limits, with advisory policy details. But it has one powerful mechanism, a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation that shields legislation from a Senate filibuster.

In 2012, the House budget ordered six committees to produce policy changes that would save $261 billion over 10 years to avert automatic spending cuts at the Pentagon. The results would have pushed 1.8 million people off food stamps and cost 280,000 children their school lunch subsidies and 300,000 children their health insurance coverage.

Elimination of the social services block grant to state and local governments would hit child abuse prevention programs, Meals on Wheels and child care.

A quarter of the cuts in the bill would come from programs for the poor. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized insurance premiums under the health care law made up more than a third of the package’s savings.

Had the Senate gone along with the budget plan that ordered those cuts, the resulting bills could not have been filibustered by opponents.

Mr. Johnson said the parliamentary tactic will be used next year. The question is how. Republicans could again use it to push through budget cuts and changes to entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, or they could use it to advance changes to the tax code that cut revenue.

“There’s a very heightened focus on, ‘The dog caught the bus. Now what are we going to do?’ ” he said.

Mr. Van Hollen said Republicans would have little choice but to push ahead with past budget plans. To do otherwise would indicate that earlier efforts were politics, not policy priorities.

“They can’t say now that they have the power to implement those budgets, they’re not going to do it,” he said.

Chris Chocola, the president of Club for Growth, a political action committee that bankrolled many of the Republican campaigns, pointed to the tax cuts of Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas and the confrontations that Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan had with his state’s public employee unions as models for the Republican Congress. Mr. Brownback is now dealing with budget deficits, but Mr. Chocola noted that the governor was re-elected.

That is all well and good, said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, but even with the tool of reconciliation, congressional Republicans will face President Obama’s veto pen.

“If we need reconciliation instructions to pass it in the Senate, the chances the president would sign it into law are not very good,” he said. “That’s the reality.”