White House officials have designed their budget proposal to fall somewhere between the budget resolutions recently advanced in the House and Senate.
House Republicans and Senate Democrats already have passed budget resolutions, meaning the long-delayed White House proposal can be viewed as a political document aimed at influencing deficit-reduction discussions.
They will accomplish only one thing: Legislation passed earlier this year required the House and Senate to pass budget resolutions before April 15 or lawmakers would have their pay docked.
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One of the points that Orszag made to the press that day was that the budget resolutions passed by the House and the Senate were only the beginning of a very long process.
Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, has at least fulfilled the legal obligation for annual budget resolutions in the lower chamber, but he's gone far beyond that to provide leadership on the long-term fiscal crisis facing the nation.
Last month, both chambers of Congress passed their own separate budget resolutions, and when lawmakers return from their current recess in mid-April, a conference committee will sit down to draft a joint budget, to be divvied up starting in May.
Back in 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that using continuing resolutions to deal with the budget resulted in "inefficient, start-and-stop management" through short-term contacts.
The House of Representatives may not even pass a budget resolution this year, for the first time since such resolutions were introduced in 1974.
The budget resolution held no one back for long, since Republicans increasingly use such resolutions as political propaganda rather than serious and binding constraints.
Other resolutions adopted unanimously by the Assembly dealt with special subjects relating to the programme budget for the biennium 2008-2009, among them a text dealing with the budget of the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for the implementation of Security Council resolution 1559 (2004), on the withdrawal of troops from Lebanon, whose narrative and logical framework had been newly revised.
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