House looks to OK budget conference report Thursday as Dems proclaim win

The House is expected to approve the fiscal 2009 budget conference report this week, which Democrats are touting as a significant election-year victory.

The report contains almost $21 billion more than requested by President Bush for non-defense agency budgets. Although it is non-binding, it effectively sets up work on the appropriations bills — which leadership aides said may or may not be coming this year.

{mosads}Democrats on Tuesday were already talking up the benefits of being able to say they passed a budget in a presidential election year. This is the first election-year budget agreement to pass the House since 2000.

“It demonstrates good government,” an aide to a senior Budget Committee member said.

Republicans agreed the budget resolution will win approval in the House. But, pointing to the uncertain future of annual spending bills this year, they said the achievement isn’t anything to hoot and holler about.

It’s unclear whether any of the non-defense appropriations bills will be completed this year, as Congress faces a tight schedule given this fall’s elections. Last year, an omnibus spending package was completed in lieu of individual bills.

House Democratic leadership aides marked Thursday as the likely day for consideration of the conference report, which was agreed to on May 20 after two months of negotiations between the House and Senate.

Leadership aides voiced optimism that the $3.1 trillion plan for 2009 and beyond will not face significant hurdles on its way to passage. House leaders are likely to consider the budget report along with a rule — passed prior to Memorial Day — allowing for an hour of debate, and a party-line vote seems a safe bet, aides said.

On the Senate side, the schedule is far less certain, with two Democrats still on the presidential campaign trail, and two others — Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) — out indefinitely with illnesses. A budget resolution cannot be filibustered under Senate rules, but it could be a challenge for Democrats to win 51 votes given the possible absences.

Aides to Democrats on the House Budget Committee said that the work done by the conferees — led by Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and House Budget panel Chairman John Spratt (S.C.) — was thorough, delivering back to the chambers a well-worked compromise between two budget resolutions that were originally only $3 billion apart in non-defense and non-emergency discretionary spending.

Democrats had originally eyed the week prior to the Memorial Day recess for consideration of the conference report, but a foul-up in the veto override of the farm bill derailed that plan. Because the farm bill relied on a 2007, not 2008, budget baseline, if a new budget had been agreed to prior to passage of the farm bill, its calculations would have been off by millions.

Manu Raju contributed to this article.