Voinovich is right about debt plan

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11:11 AM Monday, February 1, 2010

In a season when good ideas are dying in Washington and Columbus because they only have support from one party, one good idea has died that was genuinely bipartisan. Particularly sad is this: support from a U.S. Senate majority wasn’t enough to keep the idea alive there. That body is functioning under a cockamamie practice requiring just about everything to have a super-majority.

The issue is what do about federal debt. Without getting into those depressing, amazing numbers, let’s just say that a debt outlook that was monstrous a year ago has become monstrously worse, what with the recession and the federal stimulus, mainly.

Nobody is making major efforts to solve the problem. The universal assumption is that Congress is gridlocked, with the right opposing necessary tax cuts and the left opposing necessary spending restraints.

A few years ago, Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich started to push for the appointment of a bipartisan commission to make recommendations. Under his plan, Congress would be required to either accept or reject the recommendations entirely, rather than use the report as a jump-off point to a new front in the old, old, old ideological war.

It’s a good idea. Some worry that Congress would be giving up responsibilities it should embrace. But Congress could be fully represented on the commission. And if, somehow, the commission goes off in a direction that simply doesn’t work for elected officials, its work could be rejected.

A version of the Voinovich proposal finally came to a Senate vote just before the president’s State of the Union Speech. It won 53 votes. But the 46 against were enough to beat it.

Twenty three senators of each party voted no. A majority of Democrats, 37, supported it, along with 16 Republicans.

Sen. Voinovich was particularly disappointed with the opposition of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who had supported the idea in the past, and Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown.

Pro votes came mainly from senators who are generally thought of as relative moderates in their own parties, such as the senators from Indiana, Richard Lugar, R, and Evan Bayh, D.

President Barack Obama — who had an hour-long meeting with Sen. Voinovich a week ago — supported the move. But he came on board fairly late, and tepidly.

Now he has said he will appoint such a commission himself. Unfortunately, however, it cannot have the kind of the power that a legally mandated commission would have to force an up-or-down vote from Congress.

Sen. Voinovich would have liked more from the president. He expressed the hope before the president’s speech that he “looks across the audience ... to (Sen.) McConnell and says to him, ‘Look, you were for this before and the question I have to ask is, If you’re not for this, what are you for?’”

The president did roughly that on health care, but apparently wanted to limit the number of such thrusts.

It’s a shame how things are going. Here’s one issue on which a bipartisan approach suggests itself. And it’s one heck of a big issue. And a bipartisan approach looks like the only way. And bipartisanship seems to be the way the American people want problems to be addressed.

Sen. Voinovich is right and Sen. Brown is wrong. A commission with teeth is the best bet.

Cox News Service

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