Another Loss For Obama: Senate Rejects Deficit Task Force

Self-styled “deficit hawk” Kent Conrad has been pushing the creation a deficit task force for some time now. It appeared for a while that his push for the task force wouldn’t amount to much, but starting immediately after the Scott Brown win in Massachusetts, suddenly Barack Obama threw his weight behind its creation.
But the Senate still rejected the task force, indicating Obama’s waning political capital even with the members of his own party that control the Senate.

WASHINGTON – The Senate Tuesday rejected a plan backed by President Barack Obama to create a bipartisan task force to tackle the federal deficit this year despite glaring new figures showing the enormity of the red-ink threat.
The special deficit panel would have attempted to produce a plan combining tax cuts and spending curbs that would have been voted on after the midterm elections. The measure went down because anti-tax Republicans joined with Democrats who were wary of being railroaded into cutting Social Security and Medicare.
The Senate vote to kill the deficit task force came just hours after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted a $1.35 trillion deficit for this year as the economy continues to slowly recover from the recession.
“Yet another indication that Congress is more concerned with the next election than the next generation,” said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., a sponsor of the plan.

Frankly, the failure to create this task force doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. Congress already has the authority to rein in deficits. In fact, the budget reconciliation process allows for deficit-reducing measures to be passed even through the Senate by a mere 50 votes instead of the usual 60.
The problem is that our political leadership in Congress just don’t use that power.
They don’t need a new task force to add another layer of bureaucracy onto the legislative process. They need to grow some backbones to use the power they have to cut spending.