House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) once again failed to bring the budget resolution to the floor last week despite rumors and rumblings from the GOP leadership that passage of the bill was imminent. Having reached a compromise with Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Boehner was still unable to garner enough support from within the Republican caucus to hold a vote. Considering the difficulty of finding agreement in conference with the Senate at this late date, passing the resolution is now bordering on pointless anyway. Boehner and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) spent much of last week in private meetings with moderate Republicans building support for the resolution. The ad-hoc group of about 15 moderates led by Reps. Mike Castle (R-DE) and Nancy Johnson (R-CT), have pushed for an increase of around $7 billion in funding for education and health programs from discretionary spending capped at $873 billion. Such an increase would put the House budget resolution spending levels more in line with a Senate-passed version and would be the minimum increase needed to hold even with inflation. In order to win the moderates' support for the budget, Boehner and Lewis agreed last week to shift $4.1 billion from defense accounts to the Labor-Health and Human Services appropriations subcommittee total, thereby keeping the overall discretionary spending cap in place. The moderates, however, refused to back down from the $7 billion increase. So ongoing debate is now focused on where the other $3.1 billion called for by the moderates will come from. If the GOP leadership will not increase the discretionary spending ceiling and will not increase taxes, it will have to play a shell game of moving money from other spending categories. Various budget gimmicks have also been suggested to alleviate the spending crunch - such as an option used by the Senate called "forward funding programs," but such gimmicks are apparently unacceptable to the moderates, as well as many conservatives. "We just haven't gotten to a point of agreement," commented Castle. Yet Boehner and other GOP leaders remain committed to passing the budget. "We're still working on it," said House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle (R-IA). "We want a good, strong budget, and are willing to be patient to get it." During his announcement last week that consideration of the resolution would be postponed again, Boehner told fellow representatives, "there's a lot of goodwill in the [negotiation] room. When we think we have the votes, we'll bring it up." As previously reported, attempts to pass a budget at this stage are motivated more by political survival instincts than anything else. The House has succeed in passing its budget resolution every year since the Congressional Budget Act was enacted in 1974 and failing to so this year would add to ammunition to the arsenals of challengers to Republican incumbents. Appropriations Move Ahead Quickly Despite No Budget Even as budget negotiations remain stymied, the House Appropriations Committee has quickly moved forward with the appropriations process, making passage of the resolution an afterthought. On May 9, the Appropriations Committee approved total spending targets, also called 302(b) allocations, for each of the appropriations subcommittees. These allocations were originally sketched out by Chairman Lewis on May 4, allowing appropriations subcommittees to begin work on their respective bills. Three subcommittees - Agriculture, Interior-EPA, and Military Construction-VA - held markups of their appropriations bills last week, and Lewis hopes to bring all three of the bills to the House floor this week for consideration.