The looming budget deficits can no longer be ignored

The looming budget deficits can no longer be ignored

Elected officials in Washington shouldn’t need beltway retirees to be dragged back into town to tell them what has to be done. They shouldn’t, but they do.

And so, after the Senate killed the Conrad-Gregg Fiscal Task Force Amendment that would have created a bipartisan commission to craft budget proposals that would be given fast-track authority in both houses, President Barack Obama decided to create his own deficit commission.

The fact that six Republicans who had originally sponsored the Conrad-Gregg amendment abandoned it during a crucial vote is a pretty good indication that gridlock is becoming a destructive way of life in the nation’s Capitol. When it comes to the budget, Democrats who opposed the amendment weren’t willing to risk being told favorite programs might have to be cut, and Republicans didn’t want to hear that taxes might have to be raised.

Tax and spend Democrats met borrow and spend Republicans in a marriage of convenience that can only end in pain — to the American people.

These crazy kids need some grown-ups in their lives, and those grown-ups are going to be the commission chairmen, retired GOP Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming and former Democratic White House staff chief Erskine Bowles.

Simpson promised to provide the American people with an honest appraisal of where the nation is headed fiscally and with some tough love suggests about what has to change.

Lacking teeth

The problem, of course, is that Obama’s commission won’t have the ability to push action through Congress the way the Conrad-Gregg amendment could have. That prompted Ohio’s George Voinovich, a retiring Republican with a strong record as a fiscal conservative, to suggest Thursday that the amendment might get new life in Congress. That wouldn’t be a bad idea, but we wouldn’t hold our breath.

Voinovich no longer has to worry about this election year, but clearly many of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle are thinking about little else.

Besides Bowles and Simpson, Obama will appoint four more members to the panel. Republican and Democratic leaders will each appoint six additional members. If the leadership sends members with a strong commitment to solving the program, the commission might stand a chance of moving Congress off dead center. The Democrats might start with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad of North Dakota and the Republicans with Ranking Member Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. They proved their commitment to the cause by authoring the ill-fated amendment that bore their names.

If, on the other hand, the congressional appointees are hacks and ideologues, the American people will know that the architects of the economic disaster that is growing larger with every deficit dollar added to the budget would rather see their creation collapse than admit their mistakes.

That would not simply be bad governance; it would be malfeasance bordering on the criminal.