The latest round of skirmishing over oil and gas industry tax breaks is set to climax on both sides of the Capitol this week, most notably in a House budget vote that positions both parties to make their pre-election closing arguments on energy spending.

The fiscal 2013 blueprint from House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is on track to clear the chamber after a narrow escape from committee, where two conservatives last week joined every panel Democrat in voting against its $1.028 trillion discretionary spending cap. While the right views the GOP budget as too spendthrift, President Obama's party slams it as a draconian giveaway to fossil-fuel interests -- focusing on the measure's sweeping cuts to federal clean energy programs and preservation of tax benefits for oil and gas.

The most compelling consequence of the budget vote, then, may be how it affects a 2013 appropriations debate already under way in the Senate using the $1.047 trillion spending cap set by the August debt deal. Even rock-ribbed Republicans acknowledge that while the lower cap "is something that will get 218 votes," as Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) put it last week, "we will trend back toward" the higher number as spending bills advance.

"We have really good relationships on the Appropriations Committee," Kingston said in an interview, predicting a process where Democrats will "say, 'you guys backed off on the [August-set spending cap], so we're going to vote no ... until you come back with conference reports that reflect [it].'"

Though the debt deal's $1.047 trillion ceiling won over Obama and many in his party, environmentalists found much to dislike in the plan (E&E Daily, July 28, 2011). Its discretionary spending limit, affecting most efforts at U.S. EPA, the Energy Department and the Interior Department, was set more than $40 billion below the Congressional Budget Office's baseline for the year-old pact that averted a government shutdown during fiscal 2012.

Ryan's budget offers even less for federal clean-energy and environmental protection programs, while assuming new revenue from expanded domestic oil and gas drilling (Greenwire, March 20). Civilian DOE spending, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, would take a $3 billion hit to its budget authority during fiscal 2013 under the GOP blueprint.

Yet for Democrats, the most politically valuable element of the House GOP budget remains its preservation of tax benefits for oil and gas companies that Obama has staked his re-election message on repealing. The Senate is set to vote on -- and likely defeat -- a bill from New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez that would end those breaks while extending a raft of renewable-energy credits, giving Obama's party a fresh reason to decry GOP closeness to "Big Oil."

Under Menendez's legislation, any revenue remaining from the repeal of the oil tax incentives after extending the clean-energy credits would go to reducing the deficit. A Joint Committee on Taxation score his office release Friday projected that the bill would yield $12.3 billion in savings over 10 years.

Voters "want to know why these oil companies should continue to enjoy billions of dollars in subsidies when we could be using that savings to invest in alternatives to oil and lower the deficit," Menendez said in a statement.

The oil industry is not coming to that battle without new ammunition of its own. The American Petroleum Institute today plans to unveil a print and radio advertising push aimed at stripping votes from the Senate tax plan.

Like the House budget, the Senate oil bill will be watched most closely to determine how individual lawmakers vote. The last time the upper chamber took up oil and gas tax breaks, three red-state Democrats opposed the proposal while Maine's two Republican senators voted for it.

In the House, if last year's similarly structured GOP budget is any guide, Democrats are positioned to keep a united front against the proposal while a handful of Republicans from both the centrist and conservative wings of the conference could defect.

Four House Republicans voted against Ryan's fiscal 2012 framework: Reps. Ron Paul of Texas, Walter Jones of North Carolina, Denny Rehberg of Montana, and David McKinley of West Virginia. This year Rep. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.), an elder statesman among the party's few greener centrists -- and facing a tough re-election battle -- said Thursday that he is still undecided.

The House budget is expected to come to the floor Wednesday and Thursday.

John Podesta, former chief of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, released a weekend memo with Democratic pollster Geoff Garin aimed at stiffening spines within Obama's party as gas prices continue to roil most congressional races.

"Play offense," the duo urged Democrats, citing poll data that showed a majority of voters in favor of rolling back the oil industry tax breaks at issue.

"The strongest policy solutions are the ones being advocated by progressives, and are viewed as far more credible than the solutions advanced by the 'drill here, drill now' contingent," they argued.

Schedule: The Rules Committee meeting on the fiscal 2013 budget is tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. in H-313, Capitol Building.