This sort of misses the point:
John Mueller, an official at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a former Congressional staff member, recalls that in 1981, Reagan appointed a bipartisan commission headed by Alan Greenspan to recommend measures to put Social Security on a sound financial footing. Sixteen months later, the commission had compiled its recommendations, Congress had adopted them, and Reagan had signed the changes into law, assuring the solvency of Social Security for a generation.[...]
The reason such commissions work, the think tanker writes, is that they curtail “political grandstanding” and force members of Congress to deal with specific legislative proposals from knowledgeable and bipartisan commission members.
If Bush establishes such a commission now, Mueller says, its proposals could be debated as a major issue in the 2006 Congressional election campaign, and Congress could vote on the legislation in 2007, “the last window of opportunity to act calmly and prudently” before the 2008 presidential campaign.
Of course, we just had one of those. It was called The President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. It was bipartisan. It took on a thorny, important policy problem and released a set of tough-minded recommendations a full year before the next election. And then the President ignored them.
It's all well and good to pretend that the policy works are currently gummed up by an unserious legislative branch and the passions of the electoral calendar, but that's a dodge. This is an administration with no appetite or ability to pursue pragmatic, politically risky legislative fixes for tough issues. Once privatization died its public death, Bush didn't attempt to compromise on a series of tax hikes and benefit tweaks that would bring Social Security back into fiscal balance -- he just dropped it, because once the promise ideological gain was lost, he was no longer interested in the underlying problem (or at least the problem as he saw it). Same with tax reform. And it'll be the same with entitlements. There's a history here and it'd be nice if more folks in Washington seemed to realize it.
