The catfood commission honchos are confused about the grown-up rules, again:
In the days since President Obama's budget was released, the general perception has been that the president rejected the recommendations of his fiscal commission, which we co-chaired, and that the opportunity for serious action on the deficit has been lost.
That's because there were no recommendations. The rules were that your final report would contain your recommendations, and that you needed 14 votes to issue a final report. You didn't get them, so you lost.
You. Lost.
Of course, the only Very Serious solution for that is to stamp your feet, ignore the rules, issue a fake report anyway, and then loudly insist that you really won after all. Oh, and then pretend that everyone who remembers the rules is an irresponsible infant.
Naturally.
More than that, it's also imperative that Very Serious People pretend they didn't already get their shot and blow it:
Building trust and mutual respect is critical to reaching a principled compromise on real fiscal reform. To accomplish something significant, a process has to be formed that puts the right people in the room - leaders who are willing to work together constructively and who are empowered to represent the administration and both parties in Congress. That cannot happen if all involved are not confident that others are negotiating in good faith.
See, all we have to do to build trust is put the right people in the room!
That in itself is a remarkably arrogant statement, but it's par for the course for these guys. The real surprise is what comes next: that if you do put the right people in the room, and the right people can't get the job done according to the rules, you must first pretend they did get the job done, and then put those same people in another, presumably Even More Serious room so they can cover the tracks of their first failure.
Remind me again why this is so grown up?
Now, if the commissioners would like to discuss why the Very Serious Business of the Nation shouldn't be conducted under the strictures of a supermajority requirement (at least when the Very Serious Participants are unelected to the post), I'm all ears. But the notion that these two should be allowed to go merrily along as if the rules of the commission weren't known to all is simply absurd.
Which is probably why it's happening.