There's good news and bad news from the catfood commission. The good news: it's unlikely to reach agreement:
A presidential commission on balancing the U.S. budget likely will fail Wednesday to secure enough support for its deficit-cutting plan to trigger a congressional vote on it, aides and analysts said.
With just a day left before it releases the plan, the commission's co-chairmen were still scrambling to nail down 14 votes among the commission's 18 members—a super-majority threshold called for when the panel was created in February.
"We do not think that the commission's report will get 14 votes," said Brian Gardner, a Washington policy analyst at the investment firm of Keefe Bruyette & Woods....
Expectations for the commission have always been low, but some analysts said it may have long-term political meaning.
"The commission does underline a grim sense in Washington that difficult choices are coming next year," said James Lucier and Robert Kaminski, policy analysts for advisory firm Capital Alpha Partners, in a research note.
The bad news (besides the traditional media framing this as some kind of tragedy, is that Simpson and Bowles announced in a press conference this afternoon that they are defying the executive order that required they vote and release their recommendations no later than Dec. 1, and won't hold the vote tomorrow. Because they aren't voting tomorrow, the vote will not be official--it's too late.
They have been attempting to cobble together a majority in order to call the thing bipartisan, foregoing the full group meeting and vote for individual member lobbying, though are still unlikely to reach the magic number of 14 votes, and will vote on Friday.
That's in part because their individual member lobbying is selective.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., says that as of this morning she had not been shown the latest proposal of the White House deficit commission, even as she says it is being "shopped around" by its co-chairs in an effort to get the support of a simple majority of its 18 members—not the support of 14 members as was its original goal.
Meanwhile, unemployment benefits expire today for 800,000 Americans, with another 1.2 million to lose them before the end of next month. The nation still has crippling unemployment levels. The deficit is not the story, nor is the catfood commissions work. The story should be this ongoing recession and the need for investment as opposed to austerity.