When will the Gang of Six come to the rescue?
If this were an action movie, Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss and his bipartisan cohorts would be suiting up offstage, prepping for jaw-dropping, last-second heroics to save the nation.
“The Gang of Six is going to have the best chance” at arriving at a deficit- and debt-reduction compromise, said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Government. “With all the different efforts, in the end, any successful effort is going to have to be bipartisan.”
Rumors of stalemate and references to “revenue generation” have earned criticism for the six senators who also served on the president’s debt reduction task force.
“If they put in writing what is actually in the Obama debt-reduction committee’s proposal, no Republican senator will sign it, including the three with them,” said Grover Norquist, founder of the conservative advocacy organization Americans for Tax Reform.
But the Concord Coalition, a federal budget-watch group, last week released a report detailing why Chambliss and colleagues Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; Mark Warner, D-Va.; Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D., still matter in the debate over how to tame the $14.3 trillion national debt.
“The cooperative approach taken by the senators’ group is the most promising route to enactment of legislation,” the report said.
The Obama debt commission, led by former Wyoming GOP Sen. Alan Simpson and Clinton Administration chief of staff Erskine Bowles, produced its proposal in December, but without marshaling the necessary 14 of 18 votes to impel Congress to take up the measure. Since January, the Gang of Six has worked to turn those recommendations into an actionable bill, despite their political differences.
In recent weeks, a new bipartisan coalition led by Vice President Joe Biden, charged with negotiating an increase to the national debt limit, seems to have stolen the Gang’s thunder.
But the executive director of the Concord Coalition said Biden’s group lacks the long-term focus necessary for a lasting solution. “Beyond getting over the immediate crisis, I don’t think that is the group to craft any long-range fiscal reform,” Robert Bixby said.
Edward Lindsey, majority whip of the Georgia General Assembly, called Chambliss a hero for stepping up to take on a difficult issue.
“On behalf of my children, who will be paying for our debt long after we’re gone, I appreciate what he’s doing,” Lindsey said.
It’s is no easy task, given the partisan impulses.
The Republican-controlled U.S. House has passed a 2012 budget written by Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. It calls for slashing the debt by redesigning Medicare as a voucher-based program for purchasing private health insurance.
The president countered with a plan preserving entitlements by cutting non-essential spending, freezing federal pay raises and ending Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
“That is exactly why you need the Gang of Six,” Bixby said. “They are the only group in town that’s cutting against the partisan trench warfare that results in gridlock.”
Still, critics like Norquist grouse because no one’s actually seen the group’s proposal. “It will live on as the treaty that never was,” he said.
The senators have kept their plans close to the vest, with even their respective aides admitting to only sparse knowledge of their discussions. Although that has kept critics from shooting down specific elements of the proposal before it is fully formed, it has also fostered anxiety.
“I’m getting uneasy about these secret, self-appointed groups who are going to meet and apparently solve our problems,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said recently.
Chambliss has said that the group’s plan aims to trim $4 trillion from the deficit by making changes to “both sides of the balance sheet.”
Norquist and other conservatives interpreted that as foreshadowing higher taxes.
“I urge you to reject this so-called ‘deal’ which is little more than a transparent attempt to hike taxes and put off spending restraint,” Norquist said in a February letter addressed to the Gang’s Republican members, each of whom has signed a “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” vowing not to increase taxes.
At the Georgia Republican Convention on Friday, Chambliss said the Gang’s plan will keep the no-new-taxes pledge. Revenue will be increased by eliminating some tax breaks, he said, “and there’s a marked difference.”
In an added wrinkle, Conrad, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, is poised to release a budget of his own, separate from the Gang’s plan. Some have interpreted that as confirmation that the Gang is stymied, but Bixby rated it as a smart strategic move.
“It makes sense, from Conrad’s point of view, to have a clear contrast with the Ryan plan,” Bixby said. “That would leave the Gang of Six as a compromise.”
Staff columnist Jim Galloway contributed to this article.
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