Call them Super Duper Committees.
While several past attempts at using bipartisan committees and commissions to tackle the U.S. government’s debt problems have failed, including one in 2012 simply called the Super Committee, Senate Republicans want to take another crack at the idea by including it in the next coronavirus aid bill.
“Our proposal includes a bipartisan bill, co-sponsored by Senate Democrats, to help a future Congress evaluate bipartisan proposals for protecting and strengthening the programs that Americans count on,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday, referring to a bill called the TRUST Act pushed by Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, with five Democratic co-sponsors.
While the proposal was lauded by a prominent anti-deficit group, the track record of such efforts is riddled with failure.
The Bowles-Simpson Commission, a bipartisan panel created by President Barack Obama and headed by former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former GOP senator Alan Simpson, failed to reach a grand bargain on an entitlement program cuts-for-tax reform plan in 2010.
The Super Committee grew out of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which itself gave birth to soon-expiring annual caps on how much money Congress can appropriate. That panel of lawmakers was led by Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, and former Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican. It, too, failed to reach an agreement in 2011.
One Republican senator, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, steered clear Thursday of criticizing the idea but noted the historical record was not kind.
“I don’t think I’m part of the decision on that,” said Wyoming Republican Mike Enzi.
“I never comment on those because they’re so varied in productivity.”
A Romney spokeswoman said the plan avoids the all-or-nothing flaw of previous efforts.
“What makes the TRUST Act unique from previous efforts is that it sets up committees to focus on each trust fund individually, instead of one committee dealing with all of the trust funds at once,”” said Romney spokesman Liz Johnson.
“In that context, if one or two committees fail, but one or two succeeds, that results in more progress than we’d have made otherwise,” she said.
Romney’s plan would set up 12-member “rescue committees” to find ways to push back insolvency and extend the life of federal trust funds that spend $20 billion annually, a definition that would include the obvious candidates like Social Security and Medicare, but also the Highway Trust Fund, which is seeing its already its already precarious finances hurt by less driving during the lockdown and higher gas mileage cars.
While there will be some technical changes from the bill Romney introduced in 2019, the basics would remain the same: each panel would have the 12 panel members picked evenly by party leaders in each chamber in the next Congress, leaving each with a 6-6 party split.
The committees’ plans could only be adopted with a majority vote that includes at least two members of the other party. While the plans would get fast-track floor consideration, they would still be subject to the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.
According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bills Congress has passed so far to deal with the COVID-19 crisis will cost $2.4 trillion. The GOP starting point for the next bill, which is less than a third of the Democrats’ opening bid, is $1 trillion. Those numbers make finding a long-term plan even more important, according to fiscal deficit hawks.
“We should be clear: the number one priority right now should be addressing the current economic and public health crisis. But over the longer term, the best way to secure the economy is to couple fiscal support today with long-term reforms that bring our fiscal situation under better control,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
