WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The battle of the budgets in Washington is guaranteed not to result in an actual budget but it does mark the continued emergence of a real leader in Congress.

No, I don’t mean Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, the congressman who was Mitt Romney’s running mate on the losing Republican ticket last November.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington

A new Ryan budget proposal out this week incorporates most of the sweeping reforms, including transformation of Medicare into a voucher system, that Romney and Ryan championed during the campaign and which voters rejected.

Given the virtual impossibility of anything like this budget proposal passing the Senate or getting the president’s signature, Ryan is looking more like a one-trick pony than a legislative warhorse.

In any case, Ryan has long since emerged as the Republicans’ budget impresario. What’s new in the latest battle is the stronger leadership role being taken on by Washington Democrat Patty Murray, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

Murray, who has been in the Senate since 1993, is the fourth-ranking Democrat in the upper house and the highest-ranking woman.

As chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the last campaign cycle, she got the credit for increasing the Democratic majority in a year when her party had twice as many seats up for re-election as the Republicans.

Now she has shown that if the federal budgeting process is to be the battlefield in an ideologically divided Washington, she is ready for the fight.

Her budget proposal has been criticized from the left as “timid,” “vague,” and “conservative” and from the right as “irresponsible” and “ludicrous,” but she won approval for it from the Democratic majority on the committee and paved the way for the Senate to pass its first budget in four years.

Murray’s proposal doesn’t balance the budget — a goal MarketWatch columnist Rex Nutting recently argued is “foolish” — but does cut it down to 2.2% of gross domestic product over a 10-year period from a projected 5.6% this year.

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Like Ryan, Murray budgets hundreds of billions in spending cuts, but doesn’t specify where they will come from, leaving that work to the congressional committees. Unlike Ryan, she also calls for nearly $1 trillion in new tax revenue, also unspecified, and cancels the sequester spending cuts.

While Murray’s budget proposal includes further savings in Medicare spending, it does not, in contrast to the Republican plan, prescribe any big changes to Social Security or Medicare.

Her manifesto in presenting the budget echoes President Barack Obama, the candidate who in fact won the election in November: “The highest priority of the Senate budget is to create the conditions for job creation, economic growth, and prosperity built from the middle out, not the top down,” Murray writes. “It tackles our growing national deficits in education, infrastructure, and innovation to make sure we are laying down a strong foundation for broad-based economic growth for years to come.”

In fact, her proposal calls for an extra $100 billion in new spending in precisely those sectors.

Murray’s budget offers as little ground for compromise as Ryan’s proposal in the House. There is not even any certainty that Murray’s proposal will win all the Democratic votes in the full Senate.

Ryan’s budget will probably pass in the House but both proposals will land in the same trash can where most legislation in our ideologically divided Congress ends up.

Not to worry, the government will stay open with yet another continuing resolution preserving everything, including the sequester, as it is right now.

Obama’s recent efforts at community organizing in Washington — dinner in the White House! — and his pursuit of a chimerical “grand bargain” have predictably failed.

Even as the president made a trip to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers, he conceded in a television interview that differences between the two parties are so great that a deal is unlikely.

If Obama is showing more backbone this time in not caving on core Democratic issues, it may be that he has learned something about Republican intransigence in four years. But it may also be because Senate Democrats, led by Patty Murray, are reminding him what they are.