It doesn't really matter. We're long into the "post budget" age.
The government is so huge and out-of-control, (spending over $10-billion per day, and committing to even more in liabilities) and everyone knows that government accounting is mostly fiction anyway, so why bother with the pretense of creating budgets which are highly controversial and just piss off people anyway? It's so much easier just to do as they've been doing and approve spending piecemeal where they get brownie points for bringing home the bacon without the un-fun part of being held accountable for any of it.
Budgets are actually written statements of priorities. A budget says "These are the things that are our highest priorities" and voting for one is a statement of responsibility, just as you are signing to take responsibility every time you use a credit card or write a check.
The problem is that much of what our legislative and executive branches really want to spend money on (crony capitalism, corporate bailouts, pork barrel nonsense, out of control entitlements, etc) are not politically popular at home, especially with the rise of the Tea Party movement. Signing a budget filled with such fiscal malfeasance now means very uncomfortable "town hall" meetings when you get home. So why sign onto that if you don't have to?
Of course, this isn't just the work of Democrats. The post budget age is the logical progression from the post deficit matters age; the Keynesian splurge that started after the 2000 dot-com crash and 9-11 by Bush and the GOP congress. Consciously or not, they jointly concluded that in light of the market crash, economic slowdown, the wreckage of 9-11, and impending wars that the deficit didn't matter anymore, or at least could be left to be dealt with at a later date. Of course, after the relative austerity of the latter Clinton years, the Democrats were more than happy to go along with that. By the time they took back Congress in 2006, nobody was even talking about the deficit anymore, and they were poised for Keynesianism in steroids.
And as long as China is willing to keep lending and the Fed is willing to keep printing money, there's little reason to stop now.
