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House Passes Budget Pact and Military Abuse Protections, but Not Farm Bill

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The House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, doubled down on criticism he gave on Wednesday and defended the budget deal negotiated by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin.CreditCredit...Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday approved a bipartisan budget accord and a Pentagon policy bill that would strengthen protections for victims of sexual assault. But as it wrapped up its business for the year, it left unfinished a major piece of domestic policy — the farm bill — making it likely that Congress will not deal with it until January.

Republicans and Democrats hope the budget pact, which passed 332 to 94, will act as a truce in the spending battles that have paralyzed Congress for nearly three years, and leaders in both parties sought to marginalize hard-line conservatives opposed to any compromise.

The defense measure would, in addition to strengthening protections for military victims of sexual assault, leave open the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, over President Obama’s objections.

The provisions to stem the growing number of sexual assault cases in the military are the most expansive in years. They would include new rules to prevent commanding officers from overturning sexual assault verdicts.

But an agreement remained elusive on the farm bill, the subject of continuing disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over spending for food stamps and expanding crop insurance for farmers, among other issues. All the House could pass on Thursday was a simple one-month extension of the current law, which Senate Democrats oppose because they think it will distract from the completion of a new bill.

Earlier, with bipartisan support in hand for the budget deal, Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio declared war on the outside conservative groups that tried to scuttle it. For the second day in a row, he accused groups like the Club for Growth, Heritage Action and Americans for Prosperity of reflexively opposing a reasonable plan to try to raise their profiles and improve their fund-raising.

He said the groups had devised the strategy of linking further government spending to the repeal of Mr. Obama’s health care law, then pressing their members and House Republicans to go along, even though they knew it would shut down the government and ultimately fail.

“Are you kidding me?” the speaker shouted, denouncing opposition to the budget accord. “There comes a point where some people step over the line. When you criticize something and you have no idea what you’re criticizing, it undermines your credibility.”

Yet when the Senate takes up the bill, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, is likely to vote against it, as are virtually all of the Republican senators who are contending with Tea Party challenges next year or are wooing conservatives for a potential presidential bid.

Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has already declared his opposition.

“Much of the spending increase in this deal has been justified by increased fees and new revenue,” Mr. Sessions said. “In other words, it’s a fee increase to fuel a spending increase — rather than reducing deficits.”

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The agreement would raise military and domestic spending over the next two years but prevent another government shutdown.CreditCredit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

By most analyses, the budget deal, struck by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, and Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, is a modest plan to soften the blow of the across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration, that went into effect in March, and to slightly lower the budget deficit over the next decade.

The legislation would also extend current Medicare payment rates for three months, staving off a cut of more than 20 percent to health care providers. That would allow lawmakers to try to find a more permanent “doctors’ fix” to avoid a deficit reduction measure that neither party has been able to stomach for more than a decade.

The budget fight has turned into a donnybrook between congressional leaders and the groups and lawmakers aligned with the Tea Party. It pits the House Republican leadership against the Tea Party wing; one potential Republican presidential candidate, Mr. Ryan, against two others who oppose his deal, Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky; and a congressional majority against outside pressure groups, both liberal and conservative.

“It is clear that the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill,” 50 conservative activists wrote in a letter to congressional Republicans.

Democratic leaders took heart in what they saw as a turning point in their battle with uncompromising conservatives and as a moment when a cooperative attitude in Washington might return.

“The benefits of this agreement will go far beyond the actual agreement itself,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in Congress. “What we have seen in the Senate over the last several months, and now in the House, led by the courage of Congressman Ryan, is mainstream conservatives standing up to the hard right and saying: ‘This is no good for America. This is no good for the Republican Party. We’re not going to follow the Tea Party, like Thelma and Louise, over a cliff.’ ”

Conservative activists and their congressional allies said they would not surrender despite the vote on Thursday. The budget deal “exposes the true colors of several in the G.O.P. establishment when it comes to protecting conservative principles,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots.

The budget deal would reverse many of the across-the-board sequestration cuts that were set to deepen next month. Spending on military and domestic programs would rise to $1.012 trillion from the $967 billion expected this fiscal year, then inch up to $1.014 trillion in the fiscal year that begins in October.

But over 10 years, deficits would drop slightly, because of higher airline ticket fees, larger worker contributions to federal retirement plans, slower growth in military pensions, and a two-year extension in the next decade of a 2 percent cut to Medicare provider payments. Mr. Boehner said the legislation “takes giant steps in the right direction.”

“We feel very good about where we are with our members,” Mr. Ryan said.

Some conservatives feel betrayed, as they often have since the Republicans took control of the House in 2011. Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, said the House Republican conference agreed in the spring that spending levels exacted by the sequestration cuts would not change unless Congress and the White House could strike an accord to control the long-term causes of the rising costs of the federal debt, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Representative Tim Huelskamp, Republican of Kansas, said most of the deficit reduction in the Ryan-Murray legislation “could be in Hillary’s second term,” a nod to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s expected presidential bid and a measure of the conservatives’ demoralization.

The deal does not address the statutory debt limit, which Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew has said would have to be lifted by March for the government to avoid a devastating default. But Representative Raúl R. Labrador, Republican of Idaho, said Republicans “should just cave” on that, too, “because that’s what Republicans do.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: House Passes Budget Pact and Military Abuse Protections, but Not Farm Bill. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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