Others such as Rep. Raul Grijalva have already addressed the need to prevent the enactment of the recommendations from the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (which I'll refer to as the Federal Debt Commission.) Their call for a social services apocolypse is not as yet the statement the entire commission itself. Why is Gijalva even worried about voting on them? After all, it would take 14 votes from Debt Commissioners for the plan to even be brought to Congress, and there are 10 Democrats to only 8 Republicans on the Commission. Should be a breeze to stop it, right?
So, so, so, so wrong.
I think it's high time for us to review the Commission's players. Hat tip to mcjoan for reminding us about Brian Beutler's informative TPM column from September.
I don't mean this as an Obama-bashing diary, but I do think that both sides in the "site wars" need to understand the other's perspective a bit better. So today is a day for Obama Defenders to get a sense of why many reasonable people are so very upset at Obama. The Debt Commission's composition could be Exhibit A. I can express my own grievance in two words: "Rivlin" and "Fudge."
Here, you trust PBS to be impartial about straight facts, right? (Emphasis in original.)
The commission is composed of 10 Democrats and eight Republicans.
Six members were chosen by the president. He appointed co-chairs Erskine Bowles, a Democrat who was White House chief of staff for President Clinton, and Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming (watch their interview on the NewsHour). He also named three Democrats: Alice Rivlin, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve who also served as director of the Congressional Budget Office and the White House budget office; Andrew Stern, retiring president of the 2.2 million-member Service Employees International Union; and Ann Fudge, former head of Young & Rubicam Brands, a global marketing and communications company. He also named one Republican: David Cote, the CEO and chairman of Honeywell, a technology and manufacturing company.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi each picked three congressional Democrats: Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who chairs the Senate Finance Committee; and Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., who chairs the Senate Budget Committee; Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate; Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., a member of the Budget and Ways and Means committees; and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee; and
Rep. John M. Spratt Jr., D-S.C., chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Congressional Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner also appointed three members each. They are Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who has sponsored legislation aimed at spending cuts; Sen. Michael Crapo, R-Idaho, a member of the Senate Budget Committee; Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee; Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., senior Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee; Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, an outspoken proponent of deficit reduction; and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the top Republican on the House Budget Committee.
Bruce Reed, the CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council and a former Clinton White House official, serves as executive director for the commission.
They need 14 votes. Do they have them?
Let's presume from the outset that all of the Republicans will support the proposal. If I'm wrong, great. But cutting money out of the bloated defense budget is probably a fair trade, in their eyes, for the immense damage that this proposal would do to liberal programs and principles. I'm saving my Book of Revelation-based code names for the Democratic votes for the proposal, so I'll go with something lighter here. So, let's call Simpson (Snow White), Cote (Happy), Coburn (Doc), Crapo (Sneezy), Gregg (Bashful), Camp (Sleepy), Hensarling (Grumpy), and Ryan (Dopey) eight votes in favor. Now let's look at the ten Democrats to see if we find six additional Horsemen of the Budget Apocalypse.
Erskine Bowles, of North Carolina: Pretty clearly a vote "for," given that he endorsed the atrocity today. We'll code-name him "Death," in honor of today's proposal, and the fact that Sen. Simpson does look a bit like a pale horse. Bowles was Administrator of the Small Business Administration in the Clinton White House prior to becoming Chief of Staff, and now is a member of the board of directors of General Motors, Morgan Stanley, and North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company.
Max Baucus, of Montana: I believe that most of you are already familiar with the Senator who helped water down the good medicine of the health care bill until it allowed people to get sick. Out of regard for his ties to the Health Insurance industry, let's put him on a white horse and call him "Pestilence."
Kent Conrad, of North Dakota: You also know this Senator, a self-described "deficit hawk" notable for ham-stringing the public option and for being a motivating force behind a Debt Commission. He has a good record on foreign policy, but he somehow makes an exception, in his spending-prevention fervor, for farm subsidies, so let's put him on a black horse and call him "Famine."
John Spratt, of South Carolina: You may be less familiar with him. He is Chair of the Budget Committee and considered a fiscal conservative, although he has voted over 98% with the party and is the #2 Dem on the Armed Services Committee. Interestingly, he is one of those Southern Dems who lost last week, so he may be looking for work. (Gee, who might employ him?) I know less about him than the Senators, but he seems like a less certain vote for the proposal from Chairman Death and Snow White, but still a likely one. (He may find the proposed cuts to the military to be especially troubling.) In light of his committee assignments, I'll put him on a red horse and call him "War."
So those are four plausible candidates so far for membership among the Four Horseman, but they need two more. I guess we need two more names. I thought about "Stu Sutcliffe" and "Pete Best", but instead I'll go with "Conquest" -- the actual name of the white horse's rider that we somehow came to call "Pestilence" -- and the name of the companion who "follows closely behind" the rider named Death: "Hell."
Who's left over? Schakowsky, Becerra, Durbin, Stern, Rivlin and Fudge. Snow White and Death need two of them.
They won't get the votes of Schakowsky and Becerra. Jan Schakowsky is a member of the Progressive Caucus and has one of the most liberal voting records in the House. Xavier Becerra is one of the most progressive members of the House leadership, and he certainly knows how Nancy Pelosi feels about this proposal.
One would like to be able to say the same of Durbin and Stern, but one can't quite bet one's farm on it. In April, Durbin tried to soften up "bleeding heart liberals" who couldn't envision any change in entitlements. It's hard to think that someone with eyes on the Majority Leader position would hand his competition that big of a sword, though. Likewise, Andy Stern, late of SEIU, ought to be considered a reliable progressive vote. But he has joined other commission members, including Death, suggesting in that part of the Social Security trust fund be invested in the stock market (albeit by the Fund Administrators rather than by innocent individuals being offered magic beans.) So, it's not that there's no cause for concern here, but it's hard to imagine Stern becoming the decisive sixth Horseman.
Here's a trick that you learn as a social scientist: sometimes you want to rate things, and someones it's better to rank them instead or as well. If I'm right that the Seven Dwarves will all support Snow White's position, then I'd say that Spratt is around the 12th vote it might receive, while Stern and Durbin are 15th and 16th and Becerra and Schackowsky least likely. So let's look to the "swing states":
Alice Rivlin, of (I believe) DC, or at least Metro DC: She was on President Obama's Debt Task Force, and earlier was the first head of the Congressional Budget Office (good for her!), the first female head of the OMB under Clinton (nice, but a little disturbing in this context), and later Vice-Chair of the Fed (uh-oh). A critic of Reaganomics, she probably represents the nobler reasons for why one would try to cut the deficit, and may try to bargain for the most humane way to do so. But would she vote against the proposal? That's not my bet. I think she'll follow Chairman Death, like Hell.
If so -- if I'm right about the above -- that leaves the deciding vote in the hands of the least known member of the Board.
Ann Fudge, of Massachusetts: former executive at General Mills and Kraft, then more recently CEO at Young and Rubicam, and (says Wikipedia, without a reference) a rumored possible successor to Larry Summers within the Obama Administration. She's a trailblazing African-American businesswoman, which is nice, and was an Obama fundraiser, which is nice but not that diagnostic. She's never had experience in government, which is not good; she is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, which suggests a mainstream establishment view; and she is not even actually a registered Democrat, which is worrisome (and makes me wonder about those "10 Dems, 8 Repubs" calculations that I repeat above. I guess the Obama tie makes her at least an honorary Dem.) So the question is: does she cast herself as "Conquest," the final rider, and send the proposal to Congress for it to be killed more publicly there?
And the answer to that is ... it doesn't matter. This is already screwed up. Ann Fudge should not be the deciding vote as to whether Congress must vote on a proposal like this. And I lay that problem at President Obama's feet.
I'm not naive. I know that the Democratic Party is at least two parties, the progressive wing and the moderate-to-conservative wing, which delicacy prevents me from calling "regressive." And I think, somewhat unfashionably for one now criticizing our President, that there is a huge difference between even the regressive Democrats (oops, I guess I am using that term) and Republicans. There's just not such a big difference on this issue.
But if the Democrats are two parties, and if we had 10 appointments to make, is it so much to ask that the split on this extremely critical issue have been, well, 5 to 5? (That Bruce Reed of the old DLC is the Executive Director of the commission is an atrocity of which I shall not speak, and that Pete Peterson's jolly murdering machine was subcontracted the role of staffing much of the commission is an atrocity of which others already have spoken.
Harry Reid probably did sorta hafta appoint Baucus (Finance Committee Chair, Chair of Joint Committee on Taxation) and Conrad. At least he balanced them out a little bit with Durbin. And Nancy Pelosi probably did have to appoint Budget Committee Chair John Spratt -- in most respects a decent Democrat -- and more than made up for any deficiency there with Schackowsky and Becerra.
So that means that all that Obama had to do to ensure that the progressive wing of the party would have a veto -- the same sort of veto that the moderate wing and the Republicans would have -- over the final proposal was to appoint two people from each wing of the party. That means five progressives, enough to block any foolishness.
Did he have to appoint a ConservaDem as Co-Chair? I'd say that he didn't, but I can see why he'd think otherwise. So fine, he appointed Bowles. This appointment was more or less (we'll find out!) countered with Andy Stern.
I like Alice Rivlin generally -- she's a very competent budgeteer and no conservative maniac -- but on budget issues she is not a progressive. She calls herself a "deficit hawk" and while she could do our party a favor by saying "look, this proposal is too slanted," and maybe she will, she has made her mark as a green-eyeshades superstar and that's just not the way to bet. So she is functionally a "moderate" here and should have been balanced by ...
Well, with all due respect, not by Ann Fudge.
Fudge, I well appreciate, was a "three-fer" appointment for Obama, even better than this guy would have been. She's an African-American, a woman and a business executive. The rest of the committee was deeply deficient in the first two. Those demographic roles would have been quite a useful perspective of themselves -- if this were a ten-person commission composed only of Democrats that required seven votes to pass a plan. But ... it's not. The Republicans are eight white males with a unqualified love of Big Business. They include David Cote, among Obama's appointees, to offer the business perspective. That was enough balance for the business side. Should there be an African-American perspective? Sure! How about someone not steeped in the compromises and suppression of progressive instincts generally necessary for success in business? How about someone from the National Association of Black Social Workers, who could have given a view from the perspective of targets of cuts? There's a Black Nurses Association too; they might have a useful perspective on the proposal's social impact. A public defender? A liberal labor economist? No and no and no and no. Instead, he made the person who decides whether to be the Fourteenth Horseman a business executive -- a nice and admirable woman from all accounts, but not one from the progressive wing of the party (or. frankly, from the party at all.)
I know, I know -- President Obama was just being evenhanded, didn't want to look like he was stacking the deck. Well, the consequence of that is that he ended up stacking the deck, because the deck started out with eight red cards by agreement, and McConnell and Boehner were not going to appoint anyone who wasn't certifiably rotten. There's a term for being "evenhanded" in such a circumstance, and that's "playing to lose."
May I speak frankly? There were two critical decisions to be made in determining the composition of a committee of this type: they revolved around the numbers "five" and "fourteen." Nothing else truly mattered.
One -- "would progressives have fourteen votes?" -- was out of the question given the eight Republican members. It's nice to take a moment, though, and imagine what such a committee might have proposed. A transaction tax on Wall Street sure. Deeper cuts in the military than even imagined here? Sure! Breaking up agribusiness oligopolies that suck up subsidies? Steeply progressive taxation? That sort of report was never on the table.
The other question was "would progressives have at least five votes?" I.e., would progressives have a veto?
It was in Obama's hands to make sure that we would. And -- unless Ann Fudge is secretly the soulmate of Barbara Lee -- Obama failed to ensure this. In other words, he didn't just fail to ensure that progressives could have an equal shot at implementing their proposals -- too much to expect, I realize -- but he ensured that progressive opposition to conservative proposals would be reduced to impotent mewling at the margins, that we would be the happy castrata that Grover Norquist said was the ideal for us.
So this will go to Congress, and if it's to be killed it will probably have to be killed with a filibuster, and even that is no sure thing. Maybe Obama wanted it to go to Congress so Democrats could get credit for saving Social Security. But that, of course, won't be the storyline -- it will be that Democrats defeated a bipartisan proposal to reduce the deficit. "Bipartisan" as in "Republicans and Regressive Democrats," with Progressive Dems kept slightly and deliberately below the five votes they'd need to be taken seriously.
This is a catastrophe a-brewin', and I hope that Obama comes to view it as a failure, so that this too will goad him to change course and become a fighter while he still can. If Social Security gets hammered due to his choices, Democrats will be saying a lot nastier words about him than "Fudge!"