Senate Democrats Offer a Budget, Then the Amendments Fly

WASHINGTON — And on the 1,448th day without one, the Senate Democrats finally brought forth a budget, and Republicans saw that was good — but first, they made them pay.

After four years of hectoring Democrats to put their political and fiscal priorities to paper, Republicans got their wish on Friday and answered the effort with hundreds of amendments, some politically charged, others just odd, kicking off hours of laborious votes that sent the chamber into a marathon session just before spring recess.

There was the amendment thwarting regulations of greater and Gunnison sage grouse and eliminating funds to monitor the Utah prairie dog. In case a federal court ruling was not enough, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wanted to make sure money would be there to prevent the regulation of the size and quantity of food and beverage.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, stood vigil against any attempt by the United Nations to register American guns. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, went one better, demanding that the United States withdraw from the United Nations. Another amendment demanded that President Obama buy his health coverage on the new insurance exchanges being created under the new law. Still another would withhold the pay of the president’s budget director if he was ever late again with a White House budget. It was approved by voice vote, without opposition.

And even if any of those were to be adopted, none of them would have any force of law. “We all know this will come to naught. The House will pass a budget. We’ll pass a budget, and we’ll never agree on it. There’s a lot of folderol about it,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa.

“It’s a charade,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

After all the complaints about Democratic irresponsibility on the budget front, what unfolded Friday boiled down to spectacle, hundreds of amendments, all advisory only, and more tailored to the next campaign than to actual governance.

Even the name of the session — the “vote-orama” — belied how seriously senators take the exercise. “Can’t hide from the vote-orama,” trumpeted a statement by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, pretty much showing the whole point of it.

In truth, a Congressional budget accomplishes far less than advertised. It sets top-line limits for the Appropriations Committees to live within as they work on the real, binding spending bills, and it sometimes sets up fast-track procedures to consider changes to tax and entitlement laws. Even those two functions can happen only if the Senate and House can reconcile their budget plans, a long shot this year.

Beyond that, all the details hung onto the document are largely meaningless, ignored by the committees that actually draft legislation.

“Are there political games being played? Yes, there always will be,” said Senator Tom Coburn,  Republican of Oklahoma, who had filed 66 amendments by evening.

Senators signaled widespread frustration on Friday night by adopting a nonbinding amendment, 68-31, to scrap the current budget process and start writing budgets every other year.

Most lawmakers expressed relief that finally, after so many years, the Senate was working on a budget. Its plan stands in stark contrast to the House plan that passed on Thursday. It includes $100 billion for an upfront job-creation and infrastructure program, instructions to expedite an overhaul of the tax code that would raise $975 billion over 10 years and could not be filibustered, and spending cuts and interest savings that total $975 billion, by Democratic calculations, and $646 billion in increases, by Republican accounting.

Even by Democratic estimates, the Senate plan would still leave a deficit of $566 billion in 2023, while adding $5.2 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. The House plan ostensibly comes to balance that year.

That discrepancy did not dampen the enthusiasm.

“We’re doing our jobs. We’re doing the process,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “Our constituents are just so happy we’re moving forward on a budget.”

But such big numbers seemed almost beyond the point Friday, buried in a blizzard of meaningless amendments. The term “vote-orama” officially entered the Senate lexicon in 1977, according to the Senate historian’s office. By 2009, it had become ridiculous enough to prompt a hearing to demand changes. At that time, Democratic and Republican Budget Committee leaders lamented a process that had gone off the rails. In 2006, senators submitted 87 amendments. In 2007, there were 91, in 2008, 113.

This year, there were more than 500.

The main function of the vote-orama is to put senators on record on hot-button issues sure to show up in campaigns next year. Some votes were substantive, if nonbinding. On Friday evening, 62 senators — Republican and Democratic — voted in favor of building the Keystone XL pipeline. Democrats forced Republicans to vote on women’s access to employer-provided contraceptive coverage and to state whether they supported turning Medicare into a program that hands out vouchers for the purchase of private insurance. Republicans put almost all Democrats on the record opposing an amendment to block a carbon tax.

And though advisers to the Republican senatorial committee helped coordinate some of the amendments, the chairman of the campaign committee, Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, was not at all sure the votes would make a bit of political difference.

“I think voting records matter,” he said. “But I also know the public hears explanations about votes from Republicans and Democrats, and it’s hard to sort out what it really means. In the world of all this political activity and buzz, voters throw up their hands, shake their heads and say: ‘All these people in Washington, D.C., are a bunch of politicians. I don’t know what to believe.’ ”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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Democrats Aim to Turn Texas Shade of Blue

Republicans like to say they have won 100 of the last 100 statewide races. They are undefeated in those races, dating from 1996.

Sick of it, Democrats are trying to get off the ground. One piece of that effort is Battleground Texas, started by operatives from the Obama campaign to turn Texas into a blue state, or at least a competitive one.

Their opening patter is familiar: start a sustained, well-financed operation in Texas to register more voters, identify Democrats among registered voters and try to get those people to the polls. It’ll take time, they say, and it will be hard.

The organizers have started holding meetings, with two of the first in San Antonio and Austin this week. The Austin event drew more than 200 people, who volunteered their services and ideas, but they were also full of questions.

They asked who would get to take part, whether this group or that one would be embraced by the Battleground organizers, and about the long losing streak.

“Can you post a win in one race in 2014?” said Jeremy Bird, a Chicago organizer for Mr. Obama who is heading the initiative, repeating an audience question for all to hear. “We cannot let it be the benchmark, but we can’t ignore it. Would you tell a friend today to run statewide? Maybe not. We have to create the environment for people to run.”

He reminded the audience that Democrats lost the presidential race in Texas by 16 points — “just now.”

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing. Big announcements like this come and go. It’s hard to raise enough money. It is tough to keep volunteers engaged over the long haul. Organization is difficult. Texans like the idea of democracy more than they like to participate in it, if the numbers are any indication. Only 43.6 percent of the state’s voting age population turned out for the general election in November. The Republican primary drew just 8.1 percent, and the Democratic primary drew just 3.6 percent. It was possible to win last year’s Republican primary — effectively, the election that counted in statewide races — with only 738,172 votes.

Mr. Bird told the prospects that they didn’t have to win everywhere in the state — just that they had to do better than they do now. Move the numbers in a Republican precinct to 32 percent Democratic from, say, 25 percent. It worked, he told them, in Colorado, Florida and Nevada — red states that came into the blue column in recent elections. He cautioned repeatedly against expecting quick results.

“This is a long battle,” he said. “We don’t win this marathon if we don’t do this first mile.” It’s an enormous state. Somehow, nobody in politics really understands that until they go out and run. Members of the Legislature, members of Congress, mayors and others from the provinces regularly enter statewide races confident in their popularity and political ability. Even those who prevail come back with the same lament: “This is a really, really big state.”

They are not talking about geography, but about scale. Nearly two dozen media markets, 254 counties and the time it takes to organize in so many places.

The Republicans have a leg up. The Democrats used to have it. The voters became acclimated to the Republicans over a long period, starting during the Carter administration, through the 1980 election that turned on “Reagan Democrats,” and through two decades of Texans named Bush at or near the tops of their ballots.

To compete, the Democrats will have to persuade a mob of people to change their habits, to start voting or to vote for their party instead of Republicans. They have to create the possibility in the minds of their own voters that it’s possible for them to win.

If they raise the money and sustain their efforts over several years — if it works the way they hope it will work — then they can tell their friends that the top of the Texas ballot is a reasonably safe place for a Democrat.

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Senate Democrats Finally Take a Stand

It’s been four years since the Democrats who control the Senate produced a budget. That has meant four missed opportunities to demonstrate what they stand for, in hard numbers and clear spending priorities. On Wednesday, the chamber’s leaders stiffened their spines and issued a 2014 budget. If the result isn’t quite a courageous resistance to political winds, it at least makes most of the right choices and is a solid rebuttal to the heartless collection of obsolete dogmas that is the House budget.

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.

The plan, assembled by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, would raise nearly a $1 trillion in new revenue over a decade by eliminating tax loopholes and breaks that benefit wealthy taxpayers and corporations. It recommends either limiting the overall itemized deductions of the top 2 percent of taxpayers or eliminating individual loopholes like the favorable tax rates given to hedge-fund managers. Corporations would no longer be able to avoid taxation by hiding money overseas.

At the same time, this budget cuts an equal amount of spending, $975 billion, in a way that avoids the reckless damage to vital programs and to the poor in the budget favored by the House. Nearly a third of the reductions come from new efficiencies in Medicare and Medicaid, building on the reforms in the Affordable Care Act. The rest comes from defense cuts after American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, along with cuts to wasteful programs like agriculture supports.

These cuts and revenue increases would replace the arbitrary reductions of the sequester, which does not distinguish between good and bad programs or pay attention to the heavy damage it would inflict on the economy, destroying up to a million jobs.

Ms. Murray’s plan, recognizing that government has to play a role in accelerating the recovery, would devote $100 billion to new job-creating investments: $50 billion for transportation projects, $10 billion for fixing dams and ports, $20 billion for repairing schools and $10 billion for an infrastructure bank for big projects.

The proposal could have gone further. Under pressure from the false Washington “consensus” that the deficit is an immediate problem, the plan fails to spend enough on education or even on President Obama’s proposal for universal preschool. Unlike the budget from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it does not call for higher tax rates on the rich, or for a bigger estate tax, or for taxing capital gains as ordinary income.

But it rejects the hard-right insistence that the budget must be balanced in the short term, the destructive goal of Paul Ryan’s House version. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted on Friday, Mr. Ryan’s budget gets at least two-thirds of its $5 trillion in nondefense cuts from programs that benefit low- and moderate-income people. While providing the rich with a tax cut, it would cut trillions from Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, nutrition aid and Pell Grants.

The Senate now needs to make a strong defense of the principles it has, at last, put on paper.

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South Dakota Senator Won’t Run Again

“I will be 68 years old at the end of this term and it’s time for me to say goodbye,” Mr. Johnson said during a brief news conference in Vermillion, S.D. After thanking his family and staff he added: “The Bible says that there is a time for every season under heaven. It is now our season to spend more time with our six grandchildren and in the state we love.”

Mr. Johnson’s decision, coming on the heels of a spate of retirement announcements from Democrats, opens up a potential new opportunity for Republicans in the state that President Obama lost by a large margin last year. Further, the retirement of Mr. Johnson, a moderate who is chairman of the powerful banking committee, will open up that slot, should Democrats maintain a majority. His replacement could be critical as Congress continues to deal with regulatory issues.

Senators Carl Levin of Michigan, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, all Democrats, have said they will not seek re-election. Two Republicans, Senators Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Mike Johanns of Nebraska, have also said they will not run.

Republicans, who are hoping that 2014 will finally be their year after two opportunities to take back the Senate majority have slipped from their fingers, are eying Mr. Johnson’s seat eagerly.

“South Dakota voters rejected the liberal agenda by nearly 20 points in 2012, and it’s a prime pick-up opportunity for Republicans regardless of whose name ends up on the ballot,” said Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Former Gov. Mike Rounds, a Republican, had already planned to challenge Mr. Johnson. Another possible contender would be Representative Kristi Noem, who came in on a Republican wave in 2010.

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, thanked Mr. Johnson for making his decision early enough to allow his party to mount a strong defense of the seat.

Mr. Johnson’s success has been a thing of wonder since almost the beginning of his Senate career. After serving in the House for five terms, Mr. Johnson was elected to the Senate in 1996, winning by two percentage points in an expensive race for the low-cost state.

In 2002 he ran again, beating John Thune (who went on to win a Senate seat in 2004) by a mere 524 votes of more than 330,000 cast, and focused largely on agricultural issues, taking moderate positions along an array of issues.

In 2006, just a month after ascending to new powers with his party’s victory, he suffered a brain hemorrhage from which he struggled to recover, threatening his party’s fragile majority. In 2008 he ran again and won after proving that, with slurred speech and the frequent use of a scooter to ferry him around the Capitol, he could still manage his Senate career.

Among Democrats in South Dakota who could succeed him, the greatest speculation centers on Mr. Johnson’s son Brendan and former Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who was defeated by Ms. Noem and has kept a relatively low profile since but remains popular in the state.

“I’ve not discussed in detail what comes next, whether it’s Stephanie or Brendan or whatever,” Mr. Johnson said, in response to questions about whom he would like to see succeed him.

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Iraq War’s 10th Anniversary Is Barely Noted in Washington

But on one topic, there was a conspiracy of silence: Republicans and Democrats agreed that they did not really want to talk about the Iraq war.

The 10-year anniversary of the American invasion came and went on Tuesday with barely passing notice in a town once consumed by it. Neither party had much interest in revisiting what succeeded and what failed, who was right and who was wrong. The bipartisan consensus underscored the broader national mood: after 10 years, America seems happy to wash its hands of Iraq.

Never mind that Iraq remains in perilous shape, free of Saddam Hussein and growing economically, but still afflicted by spasms of violence and struggling to move beyond autocratic government. With American troops now gone, the war has receded from the capital conversation and the national consciousness, replaced by worries about spending, taxes, debt and jobs. Whether the United States won or lost, or achieved something messy in between, seems at this point a stale debate.

President Obama, who rose to political heights on the strength of his opposition to the war, made no mention of it in appearances on Tuesday. Instead, he issued a written statement saluting “the courage and resolve” of the 1.5 million Americans who served during eight years in Iraq and honoring the memory of the nearly 4,500 Americans “who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who as a Republican senator broke with his party over the war, a move that complicated his recent confirmation hearings, likewise stuck to a written statement praising the troops and urging Americans to “remember these quiet heroes this week.”

Those on the other side of the debates likewise paid little notice. Former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and many other authors of the war made no public comments. Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a message via Twitter: “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

Although some foreign policy and news organizations held forums or produced retrospectives in recent days, the floors of Congress did not ring out with speeches expounding on the lessons of Iraq. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, gave a speech about the Middle East without mentioning the anniversary. Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, was prepared to say something about the anniversary if questioned at a morning news briefing, an aide said — but no one asked.

“This is a little like the crazy uncle in the attic that nobody wants to talk about,” said John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq and is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “But we need to because we put him there.”

Critics like Mr. Nagl argue that the anniversary should serve as a reminder about what he sees as the mistake of starting the war. “It would be a shame if we did not pause and think hard about this as a nation,” he said. “We paid an enormous price as a nation. The Iraqis have paid a huge price. The region is destabilized.”

Some war supporters disagreed. “President Bush made the right decision on removing the Iraqi regime from power,” said Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense. Where America went wrong, he said, was “when we transformed ourselves from liberators to occupiers.” Like other war supporters, he expressed concern that Mr. Obama might lose the peace. “The full withdrawal of U.S. forces is risky,” he said.

Meghan O’Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Bush, said that some lessons could be drawn, but that it was too soon for final judgments. “Many issues that will be key to answering the question of was it worth it still hang in the balance,” she said.

Public attitudes toward the war have hardened 10 years later. Fifty-four percent of Americans interviewed by CBS News in a poll released Tuesday said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, while 38 percent said it did the right thing. Fifty percent said the United States did not succeed in achieving its objectives, while 41 percent said it did.

The White House found itself in the awkward position of standing by Mr. Obama’s opposition to the war but offering an optimistic prognosis for Iraq — and even giving a grudging nod to Mr. Bush for removing a dictator from power.

“Ridding the world of Saddam Hussein was a welcome development for the world and for Iraq,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said at his daily briefing. “The president believes that Iraq has the potential for a better future today because of the remarkable sacrifice and service of American men and women in uniform as well as civilian American men and women who served in Iraq.”

Asked if that better future owed in part to the decision to invade, Mr. Carney said Mr. Hussein was removed by the military sent by Mr. Bush.

“And to the extent that credit is due, credit is due to him for that,” Mr. Carney said. “That does not change, I think, assessments made by this president as a candidate or by many others on this day, 10 years after, about the judgments made to go to war in Iraq.”

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Senate Passes $3.7 Trillion Budget, Setting Up Contentious Negotiations

The 50-to-49 vote in the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, sets up contentious — and potentially fruitless — negotiations with the Republican-controlled House in April to reconcile two vastly different plans for dealing with the nation’s economic and budgetary problems. No Republicans voted for the Senate plan, and four Democrats opposed it: Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Begich of Alaska and Max Baucus of Montana. All four are from red states and are up for re-election in 2014.

“The Senate has passed a budget,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman, declared at 4:56 a.m.

The House plan ostensibly brings the government’s taxes and spending into balance by 2023 with cuts to domestic spending even below the levels of automatic across-the-board cuts roiling federal programs now, and it orders up dramatic and controversial changes to Medicare and the tax code.

The Senate plan, by contrast, includes $100 billion in upfront infrastructure spending to bolster the economy and calls for special fast-track rules to overhaul the tax code and raise $975 billion over 10 years in legislation that could not be filibustered. Even with that tax increase and prescribed spending cuts, the Senate plan would leave the government with a $566 billion annual deficit in 10 years, and $5.2 trillion in additional debt over that window.

“The first priority of the Senate budget is creating jobs and economic growth from the middle out, not the top down,” Ms. Murray said. “With an unemployment rate that remains stubbornly high, and a middle class that has seen their wages stagnate for far too long, we simply cannot afford any threats to our fragile recovery.”

Republicans were harshly dismissive of the Democrats’ priorities. “Honest people can disagree on policy, but where there can be no honest disagreement is the need to change our nation’s debt course,” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the committee’s ranking Republican. “The singular truth that no one can escape is that the House budget changes our debt course while the Senate budget does not.”

Passage of the competing spending plans does advance a more orderly budget process after nearly three years of crises and brinkmanship. If House and Senate negotiators can agree on a framework for overhauling the tax code and entitlement programs like Medicare, Congress’s committees could go to work on detailed legislation, possibly under special rules that protect the bills from a Senate filibuster.

If the negotiations prove fruitless, the next budget crisis looms this summer when Congress must again raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit or risk defaulting on the federal debt. On Thursday, House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio revived a rule — breached in January — that any increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by equivalent spending cuts.

Final passage of the Senate budget was upstaged by the process that got the senators to it, a marathon session known since 1977 as the budget “vote-a-rama.” More than 500 amendments were filed, and 70 were voted on. Those numbers dwarf previous marathon voting sessions, reflecting pent-up Republican demand for votes and a new, uncompromising view of procedure on the part of Tea Party-backed senators.

The amendments were advisory only, but they put the Senate on record on a dizzying variety of subjects, including limiting the regulation of sage grouse, preventing the United Nations from infringing on Americans’ right to bear arms, repealing a tax on medical devices that helps finance the president’s health care law and building the Keystone XL pipeline.

By 4 a.m., the senators were sitting quietly in their seats, plowing through amendments like sleepy schoolchildren, breaking only to give the Senate pages a standing ovation and to grumble when a senator demanded a roll-call vote if a voice vote would suffice. As the senators recorded their final votes, they hastily left for a two-week spring recess.

But the sleepy bonhomie did not bridge the divide between the parties. Senate Republicans and Democrats could not even agree on what was in the Democratic budget. Ms. Murray said the plan matched its $975 billion in revenue increases with cuts and interest savings of equal size. But Republicans said it did not, since it reversed $1 trillion in across-the-board cuts but did not count that against their spending cuts.

Those differences did not lend themselves to much optimism about the coming budget negotiations. “The only good news is that the fiscal path the Democrats laid out in their budget resolution won’t become law,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.

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In Shift, Lobbyists Look for Bipartisan Support to Repeal a Tax

Cook executives had backed Representative Bobby Schilling, her Republican opponent in last year’s election for Illinois’s 17th District seat, after he had joined with other House Republicans to push for the repeal of a new medical device tax imposed to pay for President Obama’s health care law. The company said the tax would cut its profits this year by an estimated $15 million, perhaps limiting future expansions. But in a hint of a shift in corporate lobbying strategy now under way in Washington, the industry pitch is now focused on Democrats like Ms. Bustos.

“Republican or Democrat, we need them to understand who we are and what we do,” said Steve Ferguson, the chairman of Cook’s parent company, who was there alongside Ms. Bustos as she toured his company plant. The visit ended with Ms. Bustos telling local reporters she would consider joining the effort to repeal the tax, which is expected to raise $29 billion over 10 years.

“If current laws are holding businesses back from hiring locally, I’m open to looking into ways to improve and fix them,” Ms. Bustos said in a statement.

Just last year, with Republicans still within reach of taking over the Senate and White House, many companies were willing to burn a chunk of their corporate lobbying budget to push House Republicans to pass bills that everyone on Capitol Hill knew had no chance of ever becoming law. The muscle flexing at least made a political point — and potentially set up special-interest groups, like the medical device industry, for a successful push this year, assuming their hoped-for Republican victories had been scored.

But then the 2012 election took place. Candidates like Mr. Schilling were defeated, even though Cook executives had contributed generously to his re-election effort, to try to keep Ms. Bustos, a strong advocate of the Obama health care plan, out of office.

Now, lobbyists across the city are redoubling their efforts to build bipartisan coalitions — not just on the 2.3 percent medical device excise tax, but other hot topics, like the possible rewriting of corporate tax laws and revisions to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that revamped the way financial corporations are regulated.

Republicans still get the bulk of the money that the medical device industry contributes. But there are some key Democrats who are pulling in large amounts of industry financial support, like Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who have been outspoken in their opposition to the medical device tax.

Bipartisanship, of course, is not unheard of in Washington, and the lobbyists and corporate players who have intensified their bipartisan push this year credit their dedication to good governance. But much of this is about figuring out a way to get the legislative train running again — so they can deliver some rewards to their clients.

“Lobbing grenades back and forth — that is not good enough,” said Don Nickles, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma, who runs a lobbying firm whose client roster includes Medtronic, one of the nation’s top medical device companies.

It remains unclear whether the strategy will work. The animosity between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill — and between the White House and Republican leaders — might be so intense that even this lobbying push will fail.

But this is the moment to try, lobbyists in Washington are telling their clients. The first two years of any presidential term are when Congress, at least by historical precedent, is typically more productive — before the political posturing for the next election takes over.

“It is no longer just about sending signals or messages,” said L. F. Payne Jr., a former House Democrat whose lobbying firm was hired by Cook Medical’s parent company last year to help its push to appeal to Democrats. “But it is time to actually pass some laws.”

The bid to repeal the medical device tax is a prime example of this shift in lobbying tactics. Last year in the Senate, the industry effort was led by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who secured the support of 33 other senators, all of them of his party. A House version pushing the tax repeal passed in June largely with Republican support. But the measure died, after it failed to come to a vote in the Senate.

This year, Mr. Hatch is again sponsoring a repeal bill, but he has four Democrats as co-sponsors, including liberals like Senator Al Franken of Minnesota.

Perhaps even more important, industry lobbyists helped circulate a letter among Senate Democrats in December, after the election, criticizing the tax and urging a delay in its Jan. 1 establishment. Sixteen sitting Democratic senators and two who had just been elected ultimately signed on. It was a real coup for the industry, as the letter included top Senate Democrats like Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Charles E. Schumer of New York.

The behind-the-scenes story of how those signatures were secured offers a window into the changing lobbying tactics. Companies like Cook Medical have seen their lobbying budgets soar, as they have beefed up their representation by lobbying firms with Democratic credentials, like the firm where Mr. Payne works, McGuire Woods, which also has former Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, as a lawyer on its team.

The appeal has included dozens of telephone calls from executives at medical device companies to the Senate Democrats or their staff, as well as many meetings in person on Capitol Hill.

Trade associations like the Advanced Medical Technology Association, have organized rallylike events in different states, and “fly-ins” to Washington, in which employees of medical equipment firms make it clear that they expect the help of their local members of Congress.

Donations from industry executives to certain important Democratic allies, like Ms. Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mr. Casey of Pennsylvania, surged in the last election cycle as the industry played a significant role in their re-election efforts.

Ms. Klobuchar, whose state has an estimated 400 medical device companies employing about 35,000 people, has emerged as one of the industry’s most important allies — cornering other Democrats on the Senate floor to press them to join the push, industry lobbyists said. The first real test will come this week. Senate backers of the device tax repeal, like Mr. Hatch and Ms. Klobuchar, plan to propose a nonbinding amendment to a federal budget bill to make their bipartisan opposition to the tax clear.

The industry executives and the lawmakers involved have at least so far avoided identifying how they would pay for the repeal of the device tax. They realize that they would only draw opposition from lobbyists representing whatever industry it is that would be targeted to make up the money. The biggest obstacle remains the White House, which last year threatened to veto the House medical tax repeal bill. The White House argues that demand for new devices will offset the economic impact of the tax.

But the industry, which sells devices ranging from wooden tongue depressors to pacemakers, has important Democratic allies now trying to squeeze the White House as well. Ms. Klobuchar and Mr. Franken brought up the topic last month with Mr. Obama during a ride they took with him on Air Force One.

“I think that there has been some renewed understanding on the president’s part,” Mr. Franken told the editorial board of a Minnesota newspaper last month — which then repeated his call for the repeal of the tax, under a headline, “If a tax has bipartisan opposition, Obama should listen.”

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