As the buy-partisans hatch their secret budget scheme, you be the judge: morons or just plain thugs?

"We can't give up for a year on trying to address this problem. I think we have to do something."

-- the pride of Idaho, GOP Rep. Mike Simpson (file photo)

by Ken

Lordy, lordy, Heath Shuler is concerned about his "legacy"! And guess who has to pay the price. Really, wouldn't think he has "legacy" enough from his NFL "career"? You know, as a quarterback who promised so much and delivered, well, zilch. Apparently as he prepares to rid the U.S. Congress of his sludgelike presence, he wants even more of a legacy as a worse-than-useless bum. So he's put himself at the center of a "bipartisan" encrustation of congressional barnacles who are working furiously, from the depths of their economic cluelessness and ideological thuggery, to devise a budget "reform" plan that will make the 1% even richer and deepen the misery of everyone else. Whatta guy!

Most piquantly of all, the dark princes of deficit hawkery are working in secrecy!

By accident or designed leak, The Hill has breached their impenetrable armor, reporting its findings -- when else? -- at 5:30am Sunday morning! This strikes me as like the traditional "Friday news dump" on steroids. Under cover of darkness on a late-winter Sunday morning?

It's true that the Simpson-Bowles Cat-Food Commission, to which the new "centrist" cabal clearly traces a line of descent, already placed a premium on secrecy. You remember how, faced with the curiosity of (gasp!) a few reporters, they resorted to holding meetings -- meetings of a public commission, ferchrissakes -- in top-secret locations? All the better to produce . . . well, the set of recommendations those avowed "centrists" no doubt had at the ready when they undertook those, er, hearings. (If a supposedly public commission holds its "hearings" in the secret dark depths of the forest, can anything be said to have been actually "heard"?)

Remembering too that the cat-fooders, despite working under its preferred disclosure mode of "none of yer damned business," was unable to sell its recommendations. From which, apparently, the new buy-partisans have learned a lesson: that their predecessors' fatal miscue was allowing their proceedings to be too open.

In case you missed the story, here's the nut of it:

Lawmakers secretly work on bipartisan deficit grand bargain
By Erik Wasson - 03/04/12 05:30 AM ET

A small, bipartisan group of lawmakers in both the House and Senate are secretly drafting deficit grand bargain legislation that cuts entitlements and raises new revenue.

Sources said that the task of actually writing the bills is well underway, but core participants in the regular meetings do not yet know when the bills can be unveiled.

The core House group of roughly 10 negotiators is derived from a larger Gang of 100 lawmakers led by Reps. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Health Shuler (D-N.C.), who urged the debt supercommittee to strike a grand bargain last year.

That larger group includes GOP centrists like Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), who has said Republicans should abandon their no-new-tax-revenue pledge, as well as Tea Party-backed members like Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

The key test in the coming months will be to see whether the core group can get buy-in from many of the 100 members who vaguely support "going big" on the deficit once real cuts and tax increases are identified.

The talks are so sensitive that some members involved do not yet want to be identified.

Shuler, who is retiring this year, is keen to establish a legacy as a deficit cutter before leaving Congress and he is involved in the drafting effort.

His efforts have the strong support of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who is actively meeting with individual Democrats to try to get them on board with finding a compromise that stabilizes the national debt. [Way to go, Steny! We'd expect nothing less of you! -- Ed.]

The House members are working in tandem with Senate negotiators who are looking to turn the outline produced by the Senate's Gang of Six into legislative language.

The goal of both groups is the same: make sure the debt is not growing bigger than the size of the economy. . . .

At this point we get a jolting reminder that we're dealing with people who have spent their lives avoiding learning anything about economics, in particular about how government debt works, and how the programs they've obviously got in their gunsights (the usual despisèd trio of Medicare, Medicaid, and the real prize, Social Security) are funded and work: "The Obama 2013 budget does stabilize the debt in the latter half of the decade, but since it does not cut entitlements, the debt balloons again after 2020 due to Baby Boomer retirements."

In just that seemingly simple sentence there's so much casually tossed-out misinformation and obfuscation at to amount to roughly the equivalent of a full-time four-year program of mis-education. But to return to that genius Mike Simpson:

Simpson said this week that a draft will not be ready in time to offer it as a budget resolution this spring. House leaders plan to bring a House GOP budget up for a vote on March 26.

A source close to the effort said the focus is on drafting now, and negotiators will address when to unveil the result later.

Simpson however said waiting until the lame-duck session to start negotiating a grand bargain does not make sense.

After the election, Congress will face deadline pressures to raise the debt ceiling, deal with expiring Bush-era tax rates and address automatic cuts triggered by the supercommittee's failure. The conventional wisdom is that any politically painful choices like cutting Medicare or raising taxes has to wait until then.

"We can't give up for a year on trying to address this problem. I think we have to do something," Simpson said.

He said that he has personally talked about the project to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who failed to secure a grand bargain with President Obama last summer. But he said leadership is not driving the effort at this point.

Simpson said his involvement at this stage is mainly continuing to educate members of the need to compromise and solve the looming deficit problems sooner rather than later.

The drafting, which he is not taking the lead on, is proving difficult, he said, noting that major deficit proposals in the last year involved major holes.

MIKE IS NO RELATION TO THAT OTHER SIMPSON, RIGHT?

Continuing:

The president's fiscal commission plan, crafted by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Erskine Bowles, did not completely address healthcare and was vague on what tax breaks to eliminate. {Did not completely address healthcare??? And was vague on what tax breaks to eliminate? Really??? -- Ed.]

"One of the problems with Bowles-Simpson, Domenici-Rivlin, Gang of Six is they're all concepts," Simpson said. "That's different than trying to put things into legislative language."

(Presumably this is still Mike "Not Just a Pretty Concept" Simpson running off his mouth.)

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