It was easy to miss, but the Senate’s top Republican suggested on Sunday that his party might support bipartisan recommendations by president’s deficit commission in December.
Here was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Meet the Press:
"The president has appointed a deficit reduction commission. This is not going to be your typical commission. … I put three members on it, very responsible members. John Boehner's put three members on it. We expect them to send up a recommendation no later than December of this year to deal with our long-term debt problem, and we do know that we have a serious long-term debt problem--unfunded liabilities related to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid…. We'll wait for their report; and I intend, if it's a responsible report that I can support, [to] encourage my members to support it. I think the president will do the same thing. We could, before the end of this calendar year, actually have a significant impact on our long-term debt problem."
When NBC’s David Gregory asked why Republicans needed recommendations from a Democratic president’s commission, McConnell followed up:
"I don't think that it ought to be a political football between now and November. We've got a bipartisan effort here, a serious bipartisan effort supported by the president, by Leader Boehner and myself. They're going to report later this year. We will treat that report seriously. I hope it is the kind of recommendation that we can support on a bipartisan basis."
McConnell might have simply been trying to avoid specific answers on how Republicans would grapple with the deficit. But what seemed new was his tone of explicit support for the 18-member commission. He sounded as if he actually wanted the panel to come up with recommendations and suggested that he might “encourage my members to support” them.
This comes on the heels of speculation that the Obama administration is quietly pushing the commission to hammer out proposals on Social Security that would force both parties to yield on some of their core positions. That speculation came out of a background meeting that Treasury officials held with a number of bloggers last week, though at least one blogger – Tim Fernholz of The American Prospect -- says he came away from the meeting with no such message about Social Security.
Regardless, Obama administration officials have been talking up their hopes for the commission in the past month or so, suggesting that senior officials don’t merely view the panel as a method of procrastination.
One thing is certain: the deficit commission has little if any chance of forging bipartisan recommendations if top leaders from both parties don’t become engaged as well. That was one key lesson from the Greenspan commission on Social Security in 1983, which worked hand in glove with both the Reagan White House and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill.
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