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Theyve written their budgets, but now Republican leaders must try to round up the votes to pass them amid an ever-more polarized GOP riven with disputes over defense spending and the pace of cutting entitlements.

GOP leaders added a new wrinkle Thursday when they announced a deal with top Democrats to scrap an 18-year-old tool designed to cut Medicare spending, drawing fierce opposition from conservative groups that said permanently ending the doc-fix walks back on a promise from the 1994 Republican Revolution.

The spending fights will make it tough for House Speaker John A. Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to cobble a coalition able to pass a budget, and they are unlikely to get any help from Democrats, who have slammed the twin GOP proposals released this week one for the House and one for the Senate as warmed-over stew.

I havent seen any budget theyve put forth in a long time that does anything more than take us back to the failed economic policies under President Bush that took us to the brink of a depression, took us into a deep recession, and now they want to go back to a budget that does exactly the same thing, said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat.

Both the House and Senate will debate their budgets on the floor next week, and lawmakers will be soul-searching over whether they can support them.

Weve already had some pretty embarrassing situations, but I think not being able to pass a Republican budget on the floor would be the granddaddy of them all, said Rep. Matt Salmon, Arizona Republican.

The big sticking point is a fight over defense spending. With Republicans in control of both chambers, defense hawks have said they must make good on promises to reverse years of cuts to the Pentagon in order to fight the war on terrorism and keep other adversarial countries tamed.

But that would require either politically difficult spending cuts or tax increases, or else the GOP will have to break the spending caps it imposed in a 2011 debt deal with President Obama.

Each move left or right loses votes for the leadership. That makes it very difficult to govern even when you have a majority of the votes, said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

The House Committee on the Budget approved its blueprint on a 22-13 party line vote Thursday after a shaky 24 hours that highlighted the defense rift.

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Republican budget proposals a tough sell within increasingly polarized GOP