GOP lawmakers mark 1,000 days since last Senate budget

Republicans’ latest push on the issue comes the same day that the president is scheduled to head to the Capitol to deliver his State of the Union address.

{mosads}GOP aides said that it was a coincidence that the president was invited to speak to Congress on the 1,000-day anniversary of the last Senate budget. Obama also delivered his 2011 State of the Union address on the fourth Tuesday in January.

For their part, Senate Democrats on Tuesday pushed back on the GOP claims that the Senate had not cleared a budget plan.

The Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), released an analysis asserting that the deal reached in August to raise the debt ceiling was, for all intents and purposes, a budget.

The Budget Control Act (BCA) included caps on discretionary spending and examined entitlement programs and revenue, the analysis said. “Republican rhetoric aside, Congress did pass a budget,” the fact sheet added.

“Either they don’t know what they did or they are misrepresenting what we all did,” Conrad said on the floor.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said that Democrats should be embarassed to claim the budget act as their blueprint because it “fell far, far short of solving this country’s fiscal problems.”

“If the BCA is their answer to fiscal sanity and preventing a debt crisis, then heaven help us,” Ryan said.

The office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) pointed out that Senate Democrats did write a budget resolution but refused to mark it up in committee last year.

Sessions said that the U.S. still faced a dire debt situation, even with the caps included in the debt ceiling deal and the automatic cuts scheduled to go into effect due to the failure of the deficit-reduction supercommittee.  

“The limits that we have are not sufficient,” Sessions said. “They were the best that could be accomplished under the circumstances, with the threat of a government shutdown.”

In all, the debt-ceiling deal will lead to north of $2 trillion in spending cuts, while bipartisan commissions have said that the U.S. needs more like $4 trillion in fiscal restraint over a decade.

“Is it not the responsibility of the president, the chief executive office, to tell the American people that the $2 trillion is not enough?” Sessions said, hours before Obama’s State of the Union address.