WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday adopted a $3.5 trillion Republican budget calling for major cuts in Medicare and other programs as lawmakers gear up for an election-year battle over what to do about government debt.
The plan, approved 228-191, calls for $5.3 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade that would affect a broad portion of the federal government. It would overhaul Medicare, pare food stamps, Pell grants and other programs for the poor, boost defense spending and reduce taxes for high earners.
No Democrats voted for the plan; 10 Republicans opposed it.
Arkansas’ House delegation was divided on the plan, with Republicans Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin and Steve Womack supporting it and Democrat Mike Ross opposed.
The plan is doomed in the Senate, where majority Democrats say it would take too much from lower-income Americans while giving tax breaks to the wealthy. Senate Democrats have said they don’t plan to pass their own budget.
The debate will continue throughout this election year as lawmakers battle over contrasting visions of what to do about the government’s pro- jected $1.2 trillion deficit.
“We’re trying to go to the country and offer them a solution,” said House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and the plan’s chief architect. “We don’t think the country is headed in the right direction right now because a debt crisis is coming.”
The Obama administration called the budget plan a giveaway to the wealthy, oil companies and Wall Street hedgefund managers.
The House vote “stands as another example of the Republican establishment grasping onto the same failed economic policies that stacked the deck against the middle class and created the worst financial crisis in decades,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement.
Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney issued a statement of his own.
“The House budget and my own plan share the same path forward: pro-growth tax cuts, getting federal spending under control and strengthening entitlement programs for future generations,” Romney said.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Budget panel, said, “Apparently the problem is not big enough to ask folks at the very high end of the income scale to contribute one penny towards deficit reduction.”
“Because our Republican colleagues refuse to ask millionaires to contribute one cent to deficit reduction, they hit everyone and everything else,” Van Hollen said.
House Speaker John Boehner said the Ryan plan would set “a course that’s sustainable not just for our generation, but for our kids and our grandkids.”
Lawmakers rejected several competing plans, including a bipartisan budget proposal based on the recommendations of the chairmen of President Barack Obama’s debt commission. Just 38 House members voted for the proposal, modeled after a deficit plan written by former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming and President Bill Clinton’s former Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles.
All four Arkansans in the House rejected the bipartisan budget proposal based on the Simpson-Bowles plan.
The bipartisan plan sought to cut projected budget deficits by $4 trillion over a decade through a combination of tax increases and cuts to entitlement programs.
“Americans are screaming for us to take off our red jerseys on this side, to take off the blue jerseys on that side, and put on the red, white and blue jerseys of the United States of America,” said Rep. Steve La-Tourette, an Ohio Republican and one of the bipartisan plan’s leading sponsors along with Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.
That vote was a setback for supporters of the deficit-reduction plan who were divided over whether to even ask for a vote, with some expressing concern that a poor showing would make it harder to resurrect the plan later.
“Doesn’t help,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, said Thursday of the House vote on the alternate proposal. “That’s why I thought it was unwise to advance it at this point.”
LaTourette and Cooper said in separate interviews that 100 or more lawmakers had told them they would support the bipartisan proposal or were leaning toward doing so.
But then came a flood of lobbying. Conservative groups such as Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth pushed Republicans to oppose the bipartisan plan, while the AFL-CIO, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and other groups applied pressure from the left.
“In a way, it was a hypocrisy litmus test,” said Cooper. “In their hearts, they want to be for this. ... It’s a courage issue.”
LaTourette said that after the bipartisan plan failed, he telephoned Bowles to apologize “for damaging his hard work.”
“I wasn’t surprised that both the right and the left came at us,” LaTourette said. “I was surprised at the ferocity of the attacks.”
Republicans, meanwhile, demanded a vote on Obama’s February budget request, which was unanimously defeated. A third budget plan, by a faction of conservative Republicans who said their party’s plan didn’t go far enough to cut spending, was rejected 136-285.
Griffin was the only Arkansan to back the conservative Republicans’ plan. Crawford, Womack and Ross opposed it.
The centerpiece of the debate was the Ryan plan, which would lower the deficit to as little as $166 billion in coming years, primarily though cuts to scores of programs.
Medicaid, the health-care program for 50 million low-income Americans, would be cut by one-third under the plan. Pell college-tuition grants, food stamps, welfare, farm subsidies and the operating budgets of most federal agencies all would face reductions.
The plan would also cut taxes, with the top rate falling to 25 percent from 35 percent. It would squeeze the number of individual income-tax brackets to two from six, with the bottom rate set at 10 percent.
The plan would eliminate many tax breaks, such as the one allowing homeowners to write off their mortgage interest, and would use that revenue to replace what would be lost through the rate cuts.
The plan’s biggest change would be to overhaul Medicare. It would offer senior citizens, starting in 2023, subsidies to buy private insurance, with the premise that competition would drive down health-care costs.
Democrats maintain that the concept won’t work, saying the subsidies won’t keep pace with health-care costs, leaving senior citizens to either shoulder bigger bills or forgo care.
The budget is a nonbinding blueprint that legislators are supposed to follow as they work on spending and revenue bills later in the year, but don’t actually have to.
Come January, though, a series of fiscal events will occur almost simultaneously.
Tax cuts first approved under President George W. Bush will expire, imposing tax increases on virtually every working American. Billions of dollars in spending cuts to defense and domestic programs, triggered by the failure of Congress’ debt-cutting supercommittee, will start taking effect unless legislators block them.
Right around that time, the government should hit its debt limit and need renewed borrowing authority to avoid a federal default. A new limit will be required from lawmakers who fought right to the brink in a similar battle last summer.
Congressional gridlock on spending bills, always a likelihood, may be threatening a federal shutdown. And a payroll tax cut, extra unemployment benefits and a host of temporary tax breaks for businesses will all be about to expire.
“You’ve got a budget just about to blow up. There’s never been anything like this,” Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition said of the intersecting decisions that will have to be made. The Concord Coalition is a bipartisan group that advocates debt reduction.
Work on those problems could well start in a postelection session of Congress.
But Cooper said he now fears that after the election, Congress will insist it must wait for newly elected members to take office. And then lawmakers will say they want to wait for the next election.
“This is the manana Congress,” he said. “There’s always going to be a tomorrow.”
Information for this article was contributed by Brian Faler of Bloomberg News; by Alan Fram of The Associated Press and by Rosalind S. Helderman and Paul Kane of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/30/2012