the gentlelady from the district of columbia. ms. norton: madam speaker, i move that the house do now adjourn. the speaker pro tempore: the question is on the motion to adjourn. those in favor say aye. those opposed, no. the ayes have it. the motion is adopted. accordingly, the house stands adjourned until 9:00 a.m. tomorrow.

reporter: what they were trying to do is raise caps from the budget control daps -- caps without any action. spending levels are going to fall $1235 billion next year unless there's a legislative fix to raise the caps. so the house democrats said, we're not going to do a whole budget resolution. it's too controversy within our caucus to bring everyone together over what an ideal plan for the next 10 years looks like. let's just do a bill to raise the caps. and that was supposed to come to the floor either today or tomorrow. they never scheduled it. but that was sort of the hope and the intention after they passed it out of committee last week. that was something that they were not able to do in the end.

after there were some serious disagreements from the various wings of the party. particularly the blue dog democrats on the one side who are concerned about increased spending, and the progressives on the other side that were very upsbet defense spending in particular being too high and wanting nondefense spending, which covers really everything else, from health toadcation, to agriculture and transport, they wanted that to be higher. so that's sort of what derailed everything. mr. holder: and you covered the -- host: you covered the rule vote. on the bright side they did pass the budget ruless t budget headline -- rule. the headline of your piece says democrats scrap spending vote on internal division. you talked about some of the with the leaderships involved. democrats must have known those divisions were there. why even bother bringing it up for a rule vote? why didn't they postpone it until they come back from their

break? reporter: absolutely. what the democrats are saying is that the rule vote, which is really the only thing which was time sensitive. i was just chatting with house budget committee chair yarmuth and he was saying, look, we can bring -- we can keep negotiating within our caucus to bring either this deal or even a full budget resolution in a couple of weeks in a couple of months. there's really not a hard deadline. but the rule vote at least gives appropriators the ability to start moving ahead and putting together spending bills because it sort of deems what the caps are. so there was a technical thing that -- in that rule vote that happened today that's going to allow the appropriators to start writing their bills and that of course is a lot more time sensitive because they only have until september 30 to do that. otherwise they need a continuing resolution or there might be a shutdown. host: on the disagreement leading into the rule vote, though, you quoted mark pocan, co-chair of the progressive

cause cuss, saying, if we -- caucus, saying if we can't get parity, there's no need for a budget vote. hat did he mean by parity? reporter: it's funny. thanks concept that in the democratic party, it's different for sort of everybody. that's a way of looking at increasing the budget that has been in place since this budget control act came in 2011. some say that you need to increase defense on parity at the same amount as a nondefense. so that's what one group is looking at. other groups are saying, you have to increase them by the same percentage and that's parity between nondefense and defense. and what the progressives like mark pocan are saying is no, we don't want to increase them by the same amount, we want them to reach par tifment we want defense and non-- parity. we want defense and nondefense to be at the same level. even if we're bringing them both up by the same amount, compared to what's in law right now, progressives say that's not good enough because defense is still $33 billion higher, we

want defense and nondefense to be on the same level. and that's sort of playing with one of these principles of how to get a fair increase in spending that the democrats have been using. host: let me ask you about a broader effort on a possible two-year deal. our capitol hill producer tweeted this. the comments of the majority leader saiding, i spoke with the president last thursday and the speaker this morning and we've agreed to put together at the staff level a group to begin discussing the possibility of reaching a two-year caps deal so we can move ahead hopefully with some kind of regular appropriations process. remind our viewers and listeners why a two-year deal, a caps deal or a budget resolution is an important thing. reporter: so this is what i was referring to earlier about the question of is spending going to fall dramatically? in 2011 there was a compromise agreement that was going to set

really low spending levels in law unless democrats and republicans came together to raise the caps, to raise those spending levels. and this is the last two years, 2020 and 2021, that have those caps. if they don't act, if though don't come together, both the house and the senate, democrats and republicans, then those spending levels are going to kick in and there's going to be a massive, massive cut on both defense and nondefense. pretty much nobody wants that because they think it's going to be a disastrous hit for the government's functioning and for the economy. so what democrats have been saying is that amid all of this internal opposition, they know that this was really an opening bid for the real deal which is the final negotiation with republicans over where these final spending caps are going to end up. because as much as democrats can sit and talk about what their ideal version of parity or nonparity or defense-nondefense would be in the end they still have to pass a law through the house and the

senate -- republican-controlled senate and have it signed by the president if they're going to raise those caps. that's what mitch mcconnell was alluding to today saying we're going to start those negotiations. host: we will see what happens and watch for your reporting when they return from break. niv elis, budget reporter with "the hill." read more at thehill.com. he's also on twitter. thanks for the update. reporter: thanks so much. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] >> once tv was simply three giant networks and a government-supported service called pbs. then in 1979 a small network with be a unusual name rolled out a big idea. let viewers decide what was important to them. c-span opened the doors to washington policymaking for all to see. bringing you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. in the age of power to the people, this was true people power. in the 40 years since, the landscape has clearly changed. there's no monolithic media,

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