After weeks of inaction, the state House of Representatives spent nearly all day Thursday in session at the Anchorage Legislative Information Office building debating the new budget proposal from the Republican-led majority caucus.
But what the Republicans had called a "compromise" budget looked much less like a compromise after Republicans steamrolled over a series of Democratic amendments proposing budget cuts and new spending.
And tensions rose as House Speaker Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski, refused to even allow Rep. Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, to bring a Medicaid expansion amendment to the floor, making it appear the new budget proposal would lack the Democratic support needed to tap the state savings account that would be used to pay for it.
The majority caucus on Wednesday first offered a measure it called a compromise with the Democrats -- House Bill 2001, officially a substitute for an earlier budget proposal.
The new plan contained some concessions that House Democrats had pushed for, including partially restoring proposed cuts to education and paying for raises for state employees that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate wanted to cancel.
But House Democrats quickly dismissed it, saying it only rolled back steeper cuts first proposed by the Republican-led Senate majority. The new measure, Democrats said, was no better than an initial budget package passed by the House over their objections earlier this year.
Lawmakers are trying to move past a budget impasse that's left a spending plan more than a month overdue and brought the state to within a month of a government shutdown.
By 10 p.m. Thursday, they'd voted down a dozen or more Democratic amendments, mostly along strict caucus lines, including one amendment to shave $200 million from the $700 million the state is expected to pay to oil companies in fiscal year 2016 and another that would have restored about $30 million more of the proposed cuts to education funding.
The budget bill includes about $5 billion in spending, but paying for it requires the Legislature to tap a state savings account called the Constitutional Budget Reserve -- a move that requires a three-quarters majority.
The House Democratic caucus -- with its 13 members in the 40-member body -- appeared poised to reject the budget proposal after its own amendments were rejected by the Republican-led majority caucus. Debate on the budget bill was scheduled to resume at 2 p.m. Friday.
The next step for the Legislature wasn't immediately clear, but the House majority has also offered an alternative budget plan that involves a transfer between two accounts of the Permanent Fund and could allow a simple majority vote for tapping the budget reserve, not the three-quarters supermajority.
That bill, House Bill 2002, was scheduled for a hearing Thursday afternoon in the House Finance Committee, but the hearing was rescheduled for Friday while the full House considered the other budget proposal.