Some House Republicans are so opposed to the Senate’s “Democratic spendfest” budget, which passed out of the upper chamber with mostly Democratic support, that they want to scrap the proposal and start the budget process over from scratch.

They are proposing the House offer up its own budget, without Medicaid expansion and with far less spending than the governor has asked for and the Senate has approved, even though they acknowledge Brewer would probably veto the proposal if it ever got to her.

Republican Rep. Warren Petersen of Gilbert is one of the lawmakers advocating to kill the budget the Senate passed and having House Republicans craft their own.  Petersen wants to go back to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee’s baseline budget introduced in January and start fresh from there.

“We’ve gone so far beyond (the JLBC baseline) that I say we need to just scrap it and start over,” Petersen said.

The $8.8 billion budget approved by the Senate on May 16 for fiscal year 2014 included about $150 million more in spending than the JLBC baseline budget  and contains a roughly a 1-percent spending increase over last year’s budget, mostly in the areas of education and Child Protective Services.

Much of that spending increase was recommended by Republican Senate President Andy Biggs in the original budget he proposed. And $26 million of that increase was amended onto the budget by the bipartisan coalition that also added Medicaid expansion into the budget.

Expanding Medicaid coverage to people at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level would increase revenue to the state general fund, but that isn’t taken into account in the Senate budget the House is considering.

“It’s a liberal budget, it came in as a compromise and then it got bloated, and now it’s just the worst of both worlds — you have a bloated budget and you have Medicaid expansion,” Petersen said.

He is not alone in thinking the roughly 1-percent increase over last year’s spending is too much.

Rep. Adam Kwasman of Oro Valley agrees that the prudent choice is to kill the Senate budget and start over in the House, and others have echoed their sentiment.

While Kwasman said he doesn’t want to go all the way back to the JLBC budget, he said he would be satisfied if the House could craft its own budget that doesn’t include Medicaid expansion and cuts about $60 million from the overall spending.

“We can start with cutting every one of those Democratic amendments that were put on in the Senate. That’s $30 million, so I’m half way there,” he said.

Kwasman lamented that, even as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he hasn’t seen a detailed, line-by-line version of the budget, and he said the whole budget process has been “hijacked” by the governor.

“It’s a failure of leadership on both sides. The vast majority of the (Republican) caucus disagrees with it,” he said.

Though the lawmakers are up against a deadline to approve a budget before

July 1, when fiscal year 2014 begins, both said they would rather miss that deadline than pass a budget that includes Medicaid expansion and what they see as out-of-control spending.

“The Legislature should exist in order to get it right, not to get things done quickly,” Kwasman said.

Petersen acknowledged that passing a budget that doesn’t include Medicaid expansion will almost certainly result in a veto, but he said the Legislature should send Brewer a conservative budget and deal with Medicaid expansion later.

“If Medicaid expansion is what’s really holding everything up, then let’s get our budget done and we can come back for a special session to deal with Medicaid expansion,” he said.

But House Speaker Andy Tobin said he wants to have an agreement with the Senate and the governor that any budget that leaves the House will receive her signature, and that means it needs to include Medicaid expansion.

Tobin said he is considering starting over from scratch with a new House budget, though it would be a mostly symbolic move and might not be viable given the timing.

“Some members were upset with the way they felt the (Senate) president was treated  over there, so I think they’re looking at this as a way to say, ‘We’ll start our own (budget) and hit the restart button.’ But it’s almost June and I’m not so sure that is the best strategy,” he said.

Tobin agrees that the Senate spending plan is too high, and said any spending plan the House approves will probably include a little less spending and more debt reduction. He said since the Senate budget is only about a 1-percent increase over the current year’s budget, “We shouldn’t have a problem taking 1 percent out.”

Tobin said it wasn’t necessarily the Democratic amendments that were added on in the Senate that bothers him, but that those amendments encourage other lawmakers to keep piling on their own priorities.

“When you start loading (the budget) up, … in my view then you open the door for everybody else to chime in. That only grows budgets, it doesn’t reduce them,” Tobin said.

Republican Rep. John Kavanagh, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said starting from scratch on the budget is one angle he is looking at, though he doesn’t think it would need an actual new bill.

Instead, the conservative Appropriations Committee could just strip spending from the original Senate package until the bottom line is more palatable for them and Republicans.

“July 1st usually forces something, not necessarily good, but it forces something,” he said.