Are Democrats setting themselves up for failure in 2011 by not passing a budget?

The most important job news of the days was not the June jobs numbers. It was a mostly ignored vote in the House of Representatives last night. By a vote of 215 to 210, the House passed a "budget enforcement resolution" setting discretionary spending levels and making it almost impossible to imagine that any job-creation measures will pass in 2011.

The budget enforcement resolution is an alternative to actually passing a budget. It does the main work of the budget, which is telling the appropriators how much money they have to spend, but it includes few details beyond that. The absence of those specifics means House Democrats aren't voting for a budget with a trillion-plus-dollar deficit, which is a vote they don't want to take, and it spares the House leadership the trouble of navigating the normal budget-related squabbles. But no budget means no budget reconciliation instructions, and no budget reconciliation instructions mean no passing jobs legislation with 51 votes in the Senate.

The 2010 elections, however, are likely to return a much-reduced Democratic Senate majority. As the situation stands, Democrats couldn't pass unemployment-insurance legislation with 59 votes, because they couldn't quite get to 60. If they have only 52 members in their caucus, they really have no chance. That's why setting down reconciliation instructions now was so important: It was their best chance to actually govern next year.

Senate Democrats are hanging this one on the House. "It was our intent in a budget resolution to include those instructions," Sen. Debbie Stabenow told me. "And we passed such a resolution out of committee." House aides retort that they were told Senate Democrats didn't have the 51 votes necessary to pass the budget on the floor, and in any case, it's not their fault that the Senate is paralyzed by the filibuster. In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called just today for an end to the filibuster.

But the fact remains: By not passing a budget with reconciliation instructions this year, Democrats are setting themselves up for further gridlock and failure next year. If you can't get 51 votes for a budget when you have 59, you sure can't get 60 votes for controversial legislation when you only have 52.

Photo credit: Charles Dharapak/AP