SALT LAKE CITY — Sen. Mike Lee says he can't in good conscience vote for a federal budget bill that includes money for Planned Parenthood.

But should Congress reject a continuing resolution to keep government running as it did two years ago, Lee could again be among those taking the heat for another government shutdown.

To avoid facing a crisis year after year, the Utah Republican wants to move Washington away from its current all-or-nothing budget process.

"If we can't make any changes to spending without shutting down the government, then we might as well fold up this circus tent and go home," Lee said on KSL Newsradio's "Doug Wright Show."

"If what they're saying is you can't propose spending changes of any sort, even for a dysfunctional program, or even worse, for a program that involves funding for the sale of human body parts, then we've got a big problem."

A continuing resolution puts the entire federal budget into one bill, leaving no room for debate on specific items such as defense or Social Security or Planned Parenthood.

That's wrong and needs to stop, Lee said. Congress should be willing to work late nights, early morning and weekends over the next three weeks to fix how it spends tax dollars, he said. Without a budget bill, government would shut down Oct. 1.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have said they would not let Congress get to that point, and Lee calls a shutdown "unlikely."

Lee's approval rating tumbled in 2013 after he helped lead a battle against President Barack Obama's health care law that resulted in a 16-day federal shutdown. He has rebuilt his image the past two years, and University of Utah law professor Mathew Burbank said the looming budget battle will again be an important test for him.

Even if he was right on fighting Obamacare and a lot of people were with him, Lee came away looking bad, he said.

"I think he's going to risk the same problem here," Burbank said.

"On the one hand, he wants to continue to show himself being a strong conservative and standing up for conservative views," he said. "On the other, there's real risk here that he gets on the wrong side of this issue in terms of appearing to shut down government."

Lee said Planned Parenthood and its allies want the story to be about anything but the videos connecting it to the harvesting and sale of aborted baby body parts.

"They want it to be about a letter or a vote or a threatened shutdown," he said. "We can't fall for the distract, distort and divide strategy of the people who somehow think this is OK."

The narrative needs to be about the continuing resolution and that Congress is broken in the way it spends money, Lee said.

The senator said Obama is the one right now threatening a shutdown.

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"If the president shuts down government to protect Planned Parenthood or to protect the interest he has to increase spending, we will have reached a real low point," he said.

Though time is short, Lee said he believes Congress could go back to line-by-line budgeting or some variation of it by Oct. 1.

Burbank said there's no chance of that happening, even though he thinks Lee is right and most people would agree with the senator. That's a process that has become increasingly difficult because of the polarization in Washington, he said

Lee's point about getting back to that is fair one, but it takes goodwill and compromise to make it happen, Burbank said.

"None of that's going to be resolved in the next couple of weeks," he said. "In all honesty, it's not going to be resolved for the rest of the Obama presidency, and probably not in the term of the new president."

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