Mike Lee: No Democratic Senator Voted for a Budget

Under the Senate’s do-nothing leader Democrat Harry Reid, the greatest deliberative body in history has failed to pass a budget for the past three years. The good news in that shameful record is that they recently voted down President Obama’s deficit-exploding $3.8 trillion budget 99-0.

The bad news is the Senate also voted down four Republican proposals that made varying degrees of progress toward getting the federal government’s destructive spending, deficit and debt under control.

The four Republican-authored budgets were offered by Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, and the House-passed Paul Ryan budget was offered by the Republican leadership.

Senator Toomey's budget received 42 votes; the Ryan budget received 41; Senator Paul’s received 16, and Senator Lee’s budget garnered 17 votes.

None of those votes in favor of a budget -- any budget -- came from Democrats.

In a recent interview with NewsMax, Tea Party backed Senator Mike Lee predicted Senate Republicans would eventually unite behind a budget plan, while the Democrats seem united behind not having any budget at all.

“We’ve got a lot of growing consensus, growing support for this idea that we need a budget, but we need colleagues across the aisle to be willing to reach across the aisle with us and join with us in an effort to actually draft a budget,” said Senator Lee. “So far we don’t have a single budget from any Democrat in the Senate.”

Lee, the author of the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, is pushing a plan that is only 71 pages long, would move the country to one tax rate, have just two tax credits and three deductions, and would transform the current system to a “simple tax rate system that enhances the transparency of our tax code and gets rid of our 70,000-page monstrosity that is our current tax system.”

In pitching his plan, Senator Lee told NewsMax that, "In addition to that [eliminating the 70,000 page tax code], it accurately communicates to the electorate, to the public at large, the true cost of government. Our current system is so opaque, it’s so complex that it does a very poor job of telling the public what government costs.”

The budgets Senators Lee, Paul and Toomey have proposed, and even the Ryan plan which we think moves too slowly to reduce spending, all show that most Senate Republicans are finally ready to vote to get the country off the road to fiscal Armageddon. The question is, now that the votes are over -- and no Democrat has voted for a budget -- will Republicans stay united and really hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire, or will the usual suspects cave and give Harry Reid and his do-nothing Democratic colleagues the air cover they need to survive another election?