House Speaker Ray Merrick is ushered away from the press by an aide Thursday after being asked whether GOP leaders have a plan for resolving the state's budget crisis and ending the 2015 legislative session.

Topeka ? When conservative Republicans made huge gains in the Kansas Legislature following the 2012 and 2014 elections, many people thought they would have an easy time pushing through their agendas on taxes and state spending.

Republican House Speaker Ray Merrick, right, confers with Rep. Scott Schwab, left, after the House voted not to bring a tax bill up for debate.

But with the state now mired in a $400 million budget shortfall — and the prospect of having to furlough tens of thousands of employees next week if the budget crisis isn’t resolved — Republicans in the House and Senate remain sharply divided over how, or even whether, to raise enough taxes to pay the state’s expenses.

And after the 98th day of what was supposed to be a 90-day session, neither Republican Gov. Sam Brownback nor the GOP leaders in the House and Senate have been able to unite their members behind a plan for a balanced budget.

“It goes without saying that it’s a failure of leadership, and it permeates up from the second floor,” said Senate Minority Democratic Anthony Hensley, of Topeka, referring to the floor of the Statehouse where the governor’s office is located.

On Wednesday, the Senate spent several hours debating and amending one tax bill before shooting the final product down on a 30-1 vote.

On Thursday in the House, GOP leaders couldn’t even muster the votes needed to bring a tax bill to the floor for debate, even though a large number of Democrats had agreed to help them on the procedural motion.

House Speaker Ray Merrick is ushered away from the press by an aide Thursday after being asked whether GOP leaders have a plan for resolving the state's budget crisis and ending the 2015 legislative session.

House Speaker Ray Merrick, of Stilwell, seldom speaks to reporters. And when he does, he typically gives very short responses as his communications director Rachel Whitten escorts him away from the press.

“We’re working on it,” Merrick said Thursday when asked whether there was a plan for ending the session.

But other GOP leaders have tried to convey the image that there is nothing unusual about the lack of progress this year as the Legislature continues to work into overtime.

“I’ve been here a long time, and tough votes don’t happen until about the third or fourth night, until about 3 o’clock in the morning,” said Senate President Susan Wagle, of Wichita. “It’s hard. Everybody has a perception of what’s best, and they come from very different districts and very different populations, and it’s hard to build consensus.”

Quietly, some Republicans have complained that Brownback himself hasn’t put forth his own plan for solving the budget shortfall.

Brownback, however, insisted Thursday that he is engaged in trying to broker an agreement, although he has not put forth a plan of his own. The problem, he said, is that conservatives are being asked to do something that conservatives aren’t inclined to do: raise taxes.

“As I’ve said all along, this is a very complicated, very difficult thing for a conservative Legislature to deal with, and we’re trying to work through that,” Brownback said.

Rep. Marvin Kleeb, R-Overland Park, who chairs the House Taxation Committee, made a similar comment to his fellow Republicans during a caucus meeting Thursday.

“This is part ideology and part, ‘This is just not in our DNA,'” he said.

House Majority Leader Jene Vickrey, R-Louisburg, said Republicans are basically divided into four camps: those who don’t want to raise any taxes because they would prefer to cut more spending; those who will only raise sales and other “consumption” taxes; those who insist on reversing course on the 2012 tax cuts for business owners; and those who are looking for any combination of tax hikes that can get majorities in both chambers and the governor’s signature.

Vickrey said most of the GOP leaders in the House fall into the last category.

“I don’t think anyone’s throwing in the towel,” he said. “We just have to find what is the structure of the components that we put together that can get enough votes to pass and be signed by the governor.”

The 2012 tax cuts

Democrats, and some moderate Republicans, argue that the source of the state’s financial problems is the very tax policies that Republicans enacted in 2012, slashing state income tax rates and eliminating taxes altogether on more than 330,000 farmers and other kinds of business owners.

Those tax cuts were supposed to have spurred job growth and economic activity, which in turn was supposed to generate more revenue from other sources, particularly retail sales taxes.

So far, though, that hasn’t happened. For the upcoming fiscal year that begins July 1, budget officials predict the state will collect only $5.7 billion in revenue, about $700 million less than it collected in 2012 before the tax cuts were enacted.

“He (Brownback) cannot admit that his tax policies have been a colossal failure,” Hensley said.

But many Republicans insist that the tax cuts haven’t had enough time to work. What is dividing them, GOP leaders say, is the question of which taxes, if any, should be raised in order to make up for the current shortfall.

The House’s next move

Earlier this week, the House Taxation Committee advanced a bill, without recommendation, that includes a combination of business income and sales tax increases, along with a variety of other changes in tax policy.

Their plan Thursday, which eventually fell apart on a procedural vote, was to bring an amended version of that bill to the floor, stripping out nearly all of the substantive provisions, and pass out a “shell” bill so that the whole tax question could be sent to a conference committee.

That conference committee could then send out a variety of different plans that could only be voted up or down, and could not be subject to amendments.

“We’ve all seen what happened on the Senate side,” Kleeb told his fellow Republicans. “Countless amendments and hours of ‘gotcha’ votes.”

But the more conservative members of the caucus rebelled, saying that plan put too much power in the hands of a small group of legislators. And some House members, including Rep. Marc Rhoades, of Newton, said they particularly didn’t trust that Wagle shares their agenda.

House leaders are expected to try again Friday to pass out a “shell” tax bill that can send the issue to a conference committee.