| My instincts were right in the post down below.
Senator Michael Bennet has stepped into the breach and proven Democratic senators are just about as dumb as the Republican kind:
A bipartisan group of senators is negotiating a roughly $55 billion debt "down payment" that would temporarily turn off automatic spending cuts and buy Congress at least six months to work out a bigger deal.
(That's the Grand Bargain, folks. - Z)
The down payment would be linked to a deficit-reduction framework that would bind committees with jurisdiction over spending and taxes to an action plan, say sources familiar with the negotiations.
If a deal is reached and leaders sign off on it, Congress could approve the plan in a lame-duck session.
You can totally see this happening, right? The $55 billion would be enough to stop the sequester of defense and discretionary cuts for six months. That would give the breathing space needed for a longer discussion. The calculus may change depending on the outcome of the elections. But it's clearly easier to get to $55 billion than $1.2 trillion, which is the ten-year cost of the sequester.
More troubling is that we don't know where those $55 billion in cuts will come from. Specifically, will they include any tax increases? So far, all of the deficit reduction agreed to, mainly from the spending cap and the sequester, which would drive down discretionary funding to levels so low that the federal court system would have to stop jury trials because they could not pay the jurors, has come on the spending side of the ledger. Nothing has come from the tax side. Saxby Chambliss, one of the leaders of this "Gang of 8″ effort in the Senate, said that the $55 billion down payment would "not necessarily" include revenues. (The other members of the group are Democrats Mark Warner, Kent Conrad, Dick Durbin and Michael Bennet, with Republicans Chambliss, Mike Crapo, Tom Coburn and Lamar Alexander.)
And then there's this "binding framework" for a future deficit deal. Now, nothing's really binding in Congress. But whatever gets decided would probably have to have a bipartisan backing to get through Congress. And we know the President supports a grand bargain. This punts things into the next Congress, the makeup of which is unknown.
Bennet has been one of the biggest whiners about a broken process in DC, yet he has failed to show even one, let alone any, guts in breaking that dysfunctional pattern and doing what a U.S. Senator is supposed to do.
Instead, Michael Bennet has run from the job he ran for.
He abdicated the responsibilities he promised to fulfill.
He's hidden from decision after decision by supporting unelected Commissions and unaccountable Commissioners.
And he's played into the conventional DC wisdom - and against common sense Coloradans - every time there's been a conflict between the two.
Here's the truth about Social Security that is completely at odds with what Bennet and Udall, and unfortunately President Obama, have in mind with their Grand Bargain:
It's worse that this political naif is so eagerly involved in bargaining away the basic Democratic principles enshrined in programs like Social Security.
I'll never let the coward Bennet forget it.
Here's his senate contact page. I suggest you use it. |
