Republicans Take Fire Over a Budget Plan WASHINGTON - House Republicans pressed forward on Wednesday with a politically freighted budget and tax plan, taking fire from the left and the right, as well as from the powerful senior citizens lobby, AARP, which said the plan "lacks balance" and "jeopardizes the health and economic security of older Americans." Before the House Budget Committee passed the plan on Wednesday night, its advocates were running a gantlet of opposition. Writing "on behalf of over 38 million members," the AARP's chief executive, A. Barry Rand, said the budget would "likely "price out" traditional Medicare as a viable option" and harm Medicaid and food stamps. In the end, the bill squeaked through in an 18-to-19 vote, with 2 Republican defections. On the right, the conservative political action committee Club for Growth said the budget "falls short" by not balancing the budget in a decade and nullifying automatic, across-the-board spending cuts agreed to in last summer's Budget Control Act in the event that a special select committee on deficit reduction failed to agree on bipartisan deficit controls. "The Club for Growth urges Republicans to support a budget that balances in the near future and complies with the Budget Control Act," said Chris Chocola, the group's president. Democrats wasted no time turning what Republicans called a sober, sensible document into a campaign platform. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wrote a fund-raising e-mail. The Democratic National Committee leapt on supportive comments from Mitt Romney. And individual candidates immediately took their critique of the budget to voters. "I think it's huge - I really do," said Dan Maffei, who is running to reclaim a House seat in a Democratic-leaning upstate New York district from Ann Marie Buerkle, the Republican who unseated him in 2010. To be running in a Middle American district with lots of seniors who understand how Medicare works on a platform of privatizing Medicare, it's fitting a round peg into a square hole. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the budget committee, pleaded for restraint. "We can't afford to keep acting like politicians," he said. This country needs leaders, and what leaders do is they see a problem on the horizon, they know what it's going to do to their country and their children and they stop it from happening. But as more information emerged on the Republican budget, opposition continued to grow. Under questioning, the Republican staff director of the budget committee, Austin Smythe, said the budget was likely to cut transportation financing by $40 billion to $50 billion in the coming fiscal year alone. White House officials said steep domestic spending cuts would push 200,000 children from Head Start, while denying access to food assistance to 1.8 million infants, children and pregnant and post-partum women. "I'm happy that you introduced this document," said Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, as the Budget Committee began its drafting. I'm happy to run against it, politically, economically, any way you want. A California Democrat, Representative Michael M. Honda, urged his colleagues to "reject the radical, regressive Republican notion that the only way to maintain sustainability is to cut every program indispensable to the American people." Republicans say the plan's failure will consign the country to what Mr. Ryan called "debt and decline." But as they portrayed themselves as the responsible adults in the room making the hard choice, they were muddying the waters with simultaneous attacks on Democrats for their own Medicare cuts. Asked whether the National Republican Congressional Committee would campaign on the Ryan budget, its spokesman, Paul Lindsay, said it was focused on attacking Democrats for $500 billion of Medicare cuts in the 2010 health care law. On the House floor, Republicans pressed legislation to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a group of independent advisers created by the health care law and empowered to find ways to hold down Medicare costs. The bill is expected to pass Thursday. And a new conservative group, American Doctors for Truth, broadcast advertisements in Florida and Texas that showed President Obama pushing an elderly woman out of her wheelchair and over a cliff. The ad was patterned on a similar one that ran last year in a special House election in upstate New York. "We felt obligated as physicians to step forward and start a dialogue with the American people," said Dr. Jane Hughes, an ophthalmologist in San Antonio who is one of the physicians financing the ad. The Ryan budget will go no further than the House. The Democratic-controlled Senate will not take it up, and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has said he has no intention of bringing a budget to a vote for the third straight year. But the Ryan plan's most immediate problems will come from the right. Representative Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas, said the plan did not cut spending as much as he promised he would in his maiden run for Congress in 2010. He also objected to "reneging" on the debt deal of July, which promised more than a trillion dollars in cuts to domestic and defense programs if a broader deficit control agreement could not be reached. "It's good, but not good enough," he said.