wkfan;1372090 wrote:At least you had the opportunity to vote on that one......

Ugh, this argument, "The Senate hasn't passed a budget in blah years" makes no sense and fails to understand how budgets are passed.
Money has been spend through various departmental and agency appropriations and authorization bills.
DOD for example has been passed through the National Defense Authorization, and Appropriations bills each December.
other agencies, like DHS and Transportation has been passed in the same fashion.
The House then passes the same bills in joint committee.
It is irrelevant that the Senate hasn't passed a budget because they never need to, as instead of one massive vote for a budget, they cut it up into other portions.

Now currently, because of the fiscal cliff, and the whole debt thing ,we are still in Fiscal Year 12 levels, when usually FY13 come into play in the October-December of last year.

If you want to argue we shouldn't be passing budgets in pieces, then fine, make that argument. But, to say the Senate hasn't passed a budget and suddenly Government spending levels are still at FY09 levels makes no sense.
Rant over.

???Who said appropiations haven't been approved and that we are still at FY09 levels?? Where did that come from? It's not that we are arguing that the expenditures haven't been approved. It's that we are arguing that we don't want to give them more money so that appropriations of this level will again be approved in the future.

There was a comment that the expenditures have already taken place so we must approve the debt limit ceiling. If a collective budget inclusive of debt reduction was put into place with planned expenditures it would be more palatable to hold debt limits to the intentionally forecasted amount. Give me that debate as opposed to a rolling 6 month debate holding multiple partisan issues ransom.