Going out with more of a whimper than a bang, the colossal waste of time and energy that was the catfood commission adjourned today, three days after its official deadline, and without holding a final vote.
Recognizing that they'd fail to meet the 14-vote threshold for passage, the 18-member commission ultimately did not take a final vote. However, members announced their positions ahead of today's final meeting, and in the end a majority -- according to Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), 11 in total -- claimed to support the proposal.
Those 11 members include politicians like Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) on opposite ends of political spectrum. But ultimately, enough liberal and conservative members opposed the package to prevent it from winning an automatic up or down vote in the Senate. Those commissioners are: Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Dave Camp (R-MI), Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and former SEIU President Andy Stern.
In response to the fizzle, the White House released a somewhat encouraging statement from President Obama, thanking the members for their work, and--here's the encouraging part--stressing jobs and growth as the primary issue. But it's not all good news:
“I want to thank the members of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform for their important work in highlighting the magnitude of the challenge before us, and outlining an array of options to confront it. Jobs and growth are our most urgent need. But if we want an America that can compete for the jobs of tomorrow, we simply cannot allow our nation to be dragged down by our debt. We must correct our fiscal course.
Nothing would be more valuable to addressing this challenge than strong, sustained economic growth. But the Commission’s report underscores that to sustain growth in the medium and long term we need to face some difficult choices to curb runaway debt. It will require cutting the spending we don’t need in order to invest in what’s necessary to grow our economy and our middle-class. It will require all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to find common ground without compromising the fundamental principles we hold dear. Because the undeniable fact is that no one party can successfully tackle this challenge alone.
Chairmen Bowles and Simpson met the charge that I gave them and the Commission: to bring our deficits down in the medium term and to meaningfully improve our long-run fiscal situation so that we can keep commitments made to future generations. The Commission’s majority report includes a number of specific proposals that I – along with my economic team -- will study closely in the coming weeks as we develop our budget and our priorities for the coming year. This morning, my budget director, Jack Lew, spoke with Chairman Bowles and invited the entire Commission in to meet with him and Secretary Geithner to discuss the Commission’s proposals. Overall, my goal is to build on the steps we’ve already taken to reduce our deficit, like slowing the growth of health care costs, proposing a three-year freeze in non-security discretionary spending and a two-year pay freeze for federal civilian workers, and restoring the rule that we pay for all of our priorities.
I don’t doubt our ability to meet this challenge, but our success depends on our willingness to engage in the kind of honest conversation and cooperation that hasn’t always happened in Washington. We cannot afford to fall back on old ideologies, and we will all have to budge on long-held positions. So I ask members of both parties to maintain an open mind and a commitment to progress as we work to lift this burden from the shoulders of future generations.” [emphasis mine]
Hopefully, Jack Lew and Tim Geithner are also going to be meeting with Rep. Jan Schakowsky to discuss her plan as well as the individuals who wrote the fiscal blueprint compiled by Demos, Economic Policy Institute, and the Century Foundation, and the economists behind the Citizens Commission who drafted a similar plan for that focus on jobs and growth.
Considering how skewed by conservative members and staff the catfood commission was, it would only be the bipartisan and open-minded thing to do to give equal weight to the proposals from the other side.