Yet another gang has been convened.
Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden met with his own "gang of six" -- including Eric Cantor, the Republicans' House majority leader, and Chris Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee -- to kick off talks on how to raise the debt ceiling. The meeting came the same day Republicans retreated from critical pieces of their budget plan, with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp announcing that he was abandoning the proposal to privatize Medicare and gut Medicaid.
The GOP is feeling the heat. Last night, I ran into a Democrat who lost his House seat in 2010 but is now considering trying to reclaim that seat in 2012; his district is home to a large number of seniors who aren't taking kindly to Paul Ryan's brainstorm.
Given the backlash, it's no surprise Republican leaders went into the Biden-led talks announcing that they weren't going to propose cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. They showed no such solicitude, however, for all other domestic, discretionary spending.
Other Republican proposals also seem to be in trouble. The plan by Sens. Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missourri, and Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, to cap government spending at 20.6 percent of gross domestic product by decade's end -- even while the number of Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries skyrockets as the boomers turn 65 -- has gotten the cold shoulder from Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid and many of his colleagues. And it looks as if Democrat Kent Conrad, the conservative North Dakotan who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, will not have the Democratic votes to pass his budget-slashing proposal out of that committee, which includes such staunch liberals as Vermont's Bernie Sanders, Oregon's Gordon Merkley, and Maryland's Ben Cardin.
The lines in the sand that the administration and congressional Democrats plan to draw are less clear. The White House has called for a deficit trigger instead of a spending cap to help curb the deficit -- a position that has drawn widespread, though not universal, support among Hill Democrats. Even off the Hill, the administration's call for a deficit trigger has garnered qualified support from liberals.
"It's critical that the demand be for a deficit trigger, not a cap on spending," says one lobbyist for a progressive organization. "It's the one way to keep revenues [that is, tax hikes] on the table."
But what tax hikes and what spending cuts the White House will embrace remains a cause for worry. Some unions are apprehensive that the White House and Democratic leaders may be willing to end or reduce the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, which is how roughly 120 million Americans receive medical coverage.
"It's not exactly a progressive tax reform to target a deduction that benefits half of American workers and their families," one union leader says.
But even more than concerns about protecting particular programs, the greatest source of anxiety among liberals -- particularly given President Obama's agreement to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in last December's budget negotiations -- is about the administration's poker skills. Progressives fear that the White House and Democratic congressional leaders are more focused on the need to raise the debt ceiling than Republicans are and will therefore be willing to concede more. "It's not a good negotiating stance," says the union leader. "I worry about the Democrats being too 'responsible.'"
