WSJ:
Cantor Tells Deficit Panel to Think Small
A panel of lawmakers tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts should avoid discussion of raising taxes or making substantial changes to large entitlement programs and focus just on areas where a deficit-reduction agreement is more likely, a top House Republican said Tuesday.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) told reporters that the group should use the efforts of an earlier round of deficit talks that he participated in and that were led by Vice President Joe Biden as a framework for their discussions. [...] The No. 2 ranking House GOP leader said that Republicans wouldn’t agree to support tax increases, while Democrats continue to insist that there should no changes to benefits paid out through large entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security.
So five months after nearly every House Republican voted to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers for private insurance, Eric Cantor now says he doesn't want to talk about Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. Gee, what a shock.
Combined with the fact that Grover Norquist rules the GOP's world, there's really only two options left for Republicans on the Super Congress: they can fail to come up with any sort of plan, forcing Congress to repeal the trigger, or they can come up with a fig leaf of a plan that relies mostly on recognizing war savings and trims "waste," avoiding the trigger without taking any major action.
Whatever the final outcome ends up being, however, nothing will change the fact that Republicans voted to repeal Medicare. And Democrats would be insane to not make that a centerpiece of the 2012 campaign.