Budget compromise clears crucial vote on way to Senate passage

Twelve Senate Republicans joined Democrats in a procedural vote on Tuesday, which means a bipartisan budget bill crafted in the House of Representatives will be voted on — and likely passed — on Wednesday.

Republicans, who control the House, provided more than half the yes votes when the budget deal passed the House 332 to 94 last week.

The final Senate vote is expected to be along party lines, and President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill.

While the bill enjoyed bipartisan support rare in present-day Washington, its mixture of spending and benefit cuts and new user fees still gave both parties plenty of fodder for complaint.

And some budget analysts say it does little to fix the long-term financial concerns because it doesn't substantially address the conservative desire to reduce the deficit and falls short of fully funding social programs that many Democrats and economists say could help stimulate the economy.

The bill, brokered by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., would restore about $63 billion in across-the-board spending cuts scheduled to take effect over the next two years, evenly divided between the military and the rest of the budget.

The deal calls for $23 billion in budget savings over the next decade, drawn from extended cuts to Medicare providers and reduced cost-of-living increases to military retirement pay, among many other cuts.

The $85 billion in crippling automatic spending cuts — known in Washington as sequestration — were scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1 unless Congress passed the bill.

Restoring funding for an assortment of those potential cuts has led some Republicans to say the bill doesn’t go far enough to reduce spending.

Also, the bill has angered Democrats for not extending emergency unemployment insurance. Now some 1.3 million long-term jobless could see their benefits expire on Dec. 28. The Senate’s Democratic leadership has expressed a desire to extend the insurance retroactively in early 2014.

While the budget will avert a situation like the crisis that Congress faced over the government shutdown in October, some say the solution is too temporary.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan analysis group, said the bill provides no relief from automatic sequestration cuts after 2015.

That means that there’s a possibility of further cuts to programs that support community block grants, unemployment and other social-safety-net programs.

And although the big numbers in the bill have been solidified, it’s not clear where, exactly, much of the savings will come from.

Next month, when members of Congress write an appropriations bill, they’ll have to decide which programs  — for example, Head Start and housing assistance — get their funding restored and which are given less money, in the name of bipartisan agreement.

Al Jazeera and wire services