WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday passed a $2.4-trillion budget for the 2005 fiscal year that Republicans say will cut the deficit in half by 2009, extend some tax cuts and increase spending on defense and homeland security.
The House budget, like the Senate version passed this month, closely reflects President Bush's wishes, although it calls for quicker reduction of the deficit -- expected to hit a record $477 billion this year -- and offers fewer tax cuts in the next five years than Bush sought.
Informal negotiations were under way between the two chambers to reconcile their budgets even before the House narrowly approved the bill, 215 to 212. The two sides are expected to clash over the House's call for deeper tax cuts and its rejection of the Senate's bipartisan decision to offset tax cuts with spending cuts or tax increases.
With the deficit an issue in the 2004 election, this year's budget process shifted from the emphasis on cutting taxes that dominated the first years of the Bush administration to worries about mounting shortfalls and what Republicans described as out-of-control spending.
Congressional budgets are largely nonbinding, but they provide broad parameters for spending and revenue. In an election year, they also help define each party's priorities for voters. Democrats offered three alternative budgets and said their plans would reduce the deficit faster, roll back tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and spend more on domestic programs. All three plans were easily defeated by the Republican majority.
"Once again, as we do every year, we have two radically different visions for the future of America presented in the budget debate," Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said in wrapping up the debate. Republicans, he said, were determined to cut taxes and spending, while Democrats were determined to raise both.
But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) accused Republicans, "for the fourth time in four years," of seeking "to pass a budget that is nothing less than an assault on our national values."
No Democrats voted for the budget, while 10 Republicans broke with their party to oppose it. The California delegation split along party lines, with all Republicans in favor and all Democrats against.
The Republican leaders in both chambers hope to have a compromise bill ready for a vote before April 15. Bush praised the House for its action and called on the House and the Senate "to reach agreement quickly."
