Fiscal Sanity

APWill deficit hawk George Voinovich get the last laugh?

He's been gone from the Senate since the first of the year, but George Voinovich's fingerprints could be on the deal that finally ends the debt ceiling standoff that has Washington tied in knots and Wall Street on edge. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and his GOP counterpart Mitch McConnell are discussing a commission that would develop a broad tax reform proposal and perhaps a second that would suggest ways to restructure Social Security and Medicare. Whatever's proposed would be subject to a straight up-or-down vote -- no amendments, no cherry-picking the popular stuff and skipping the pain. Voinovich spent his final years on Capitol Hill trying to convince his colleagues -- and two presidents -- to use that model to tackle the deficit. The best he could do was the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission which produced a tough, smart blueprint for fiscal sanity that's yet to see the light of day in Congress.
The compromise  would piggyback on to McConnell's Rube Goldberg plan to raise the debt limit in three incremental steps between now and the fall of 2012. McConnell's idea is -- depending on your perspective -- either incredibly clever or incredibly cynical: The debt ceiling gets raised and Republicans get to vote against it without risking a "huge financial calamity" (to use Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's words). A Voinovich-style commission approach arguably could give the deal a veneer of meaning -- though you have to think Congress will be reluctant to approve anything too sweeping during a campaign season in which the size and scope of government will likely be a defining issue.

Fallout:

When the debt impasse is resolved, the postmortems on the role of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor -- and the impact on his political future -- will make for interesting reading. Cantor clearly annoys Democrats from the president on down. But despite Speaker John Boehner's insistence that they're on the same page, also seems to grate on other Republican leaders, too. He pulled the rug out from under Boehner last weekend when a grand bargain seemed with reach, then poured cold water on McConnell's effort to defuse the confrontation. This doubtless plays well with the Tea Party wing of the GOP, which Cantor was courting even before last fall's Republican takeover and which regards deal-makers like Boehner with suspicion. It's assumed on Capitol Hill that a Boehner-Cantor showdown is simply a matter of time, and the past few weeks have done nothing to diminish that belief. end quote from  http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/07/george_voinovich_is_back_--_at.html

A commision for an up or down vote on broad tax reform actually makes sense rather than debating each little point until the cows come home and nothing at all getting done. However, if the end result is something No one wants to vote for in the first place it is all meaningless.

Yes. I also think it is only a matter of time before Cantor and Boehnor get into a fight. In the end the dealmaker, Boehnor or someone else like him will win. In the end it is the deal makers that have made congress work since its inception in the late 1700s. Our whole system is based upon compromise and deal making. The middle always wins.  The extremes don't.