Any hopes that House Democrats had of forming a governing coalition with moderate Republicans this year were dampened Thursday, but maybe only a little, after a vote to change an obscure but important rule of the House fell almost exactly on Democratic-Republican party lines.

But while the rules may be obscure to outside observers, Thursday’s vote may be a precursor of things to come when the House gets ready in the coming weeks to vote on a bill to fill this year’s $340 million budget gap.

At issue was a rule commonly known as “PAY-Go,” an acronym for “pay as you go.” It says that when a spending bill comes to the floor of the House, no amendment can be made to increase spending in one area unless it’s accompanied by a cut of equal or greater size in some other area of the bill.

Democrats, and some Republicans, have long been frustrated by that rule because, they say, it puts too much power in the hands of a handful of lawmakers on the Appropriations Committee to determine the upper limit of what the state is going to spend.

It was enacted in 2011 after conservative Republicans gained full control of the House. They argued that it was intended to prevent so-called “gotcha” votes that were common before then, when members would offer amendments to add funding for politically popular programs, even though there wasn’t sufficient money to pay for them, effectively daring the other side to vote no, which would naturally lead to postcards in the next election saying, “Rep. (fill in the name) opposed funding a great thing.”

Others, however, have suggested it was also about tax policy. By adding amendments to increase spending, Democrats and moderates could force the hand of the tax committees to either raise enough revenue to pay for the budget, or prevent those committees from passing large tax cuts.

The proposed new rules offered to loosen the pay-go rule a little bit by providing that members could offer amendments to raise spending in years when the state has a projected ending balance of at least 7.5 percent of total spending. But Democrats wanted to go further by repealing the pay-go rule entirely.

Rep. Henry Helgerson, D-Wichita, offered that amendment, arguing among other things that the pay-go rule prevents lawmakers who are not on the Appropriations Committee from fully representing the interests of their constituents.

Helgerson has been in and out of the Legislature (but mostly in) since 1983 and served on the Appropriations Committee long before the PAY-Go rule was adopted.

“PAY-Go was put in as a way of controlling the discussion on the floor,” he said. “We always balanced budgets before this, and we actually did a better job than what’s gone on in the last few years.”

But in the first vote in which Democrats were hoping to pull moderate Republicans to their side and overturn policies enacted by conservatives, the effort failed.

Rep. Don Hineman, R-Dighton, a moderate Republican and the new House Majority Leader, stood up to oppose the amendment, arguing that it was really a moot issue. “We’re broke, and there’s no possibility of finding another pot of money to add anything to a budget right now,” he said.

The vote, although unrecorded, fell almost exactly on party lines: 39 Democrats and one Republican voted yes; 82 Republicans voted no.

“I think there are still opportunities for Republicans and Democrats to work together,” Helgerson said after the vote, “but they’ve got to prove they want to work on the budget. They haven’t proved it yet.”

Rep. Tom Sawyer, another Wichita Democrat who has been in and out of the House since the 1980s, said he was only mildly frustrated by the vote.

“I think there’s a good spirit of cooperation here,” Sawyer said, noting that both parties worked for passage of the first bill of the session dealing with special congressional elections. “Yeah, we’d like to have gotten rid of the PAY-Go rule, but I think there’s still a lot of positive attitude. Maybe not a encouraging as if we’d gotten rid of PAY-Go, but we’ll see.”

Meanwhile, Hineman said he still hopes for more bipartisan cooperation as the session goes on.

“PAY-Go is a difficult question for a lot of members of this body. I don’t think it was entirely reflected in the vote today,” he said. “But I do stand on my assertion that right now, it’s a moot point. We’re broke. The more important question is, will leadership allow full and open debate, and the bringing of amendments within the framework of PAY-Go, and that hasn’t always been the case in the past. I think it will be this time.”