Conrad Amendment Debate and Vote

I witnessed an interesting U.S. Senate session on C-Span2 Tuesday, with amendments being debated and voted on concerning the bill raising the debt limit. Senators Conrad (D, ND) and Gregg (R, NH) put out an amendment establishing an "independent" commission that would study the congressional budget and make recommendations regarding where appropriate cuts could be made to reduce the national debt. The Senate and House would then be obligated to vote up-or-down on the committee's report, with no amendments of their own possible if the report were passed. And if passed, all of the commission's recommendations would become law, pending the President's signature. This amendment's sponsors pointed out in debate that Congress, with its extreme partisanship and susceptibility to special interests, has repeatedly reneged on its fiscal responsibility in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Deficit spending has run up the national debt to the point where we will soon be considered more of a risk to foreign lenders and the interest on their loans to us will dramatically rise. And that will mark our nation's steep and possibly irreversible decline, both in terms of domestic standard of living and world standing.

Standing firmly in opposition to the Conrad Amendment was Senator Baucus (D, MT), who charged that its implementation would co-opt the proper role of Congress in setting the federal government's financial policy. He pointed out that Congress was able to substantially reduce its deficit spending in 1990, 1993, and 1997 merely through its own conventional processes, needing no outside commission "help" to accomplish this. He also expressed fears which many on his side of the aisle had that Social Security would be one of the programs targeted for cuts by a new commission. Baucus thus put out his own amendment to assure that the commission could not arbitrarily include social security cuts in its report. To this amendment was added a provision from Senator Grassley (R, IA) that inserted a similar protection against raising taxes to reduce the deficit. The Baucus Amendment then went to a floor vote and passed 97-0.

Baucus wasn't opposed to an independent commission per se. He said that he would be offering his own amendment to create one whose findings would be amendable by Congress. Conrad and Gregg opposed this idea, though, saying that this would defeat the whole point of having the commission in the first place.

So opponents to the Conrad Amendment, depending on their political orientation, either feared higher taxes or cuts to entitlement programs. To me, that sounds pretty good, actually, and shows that this is not a partisan amendment hatched by one party to suit its own ideological purposes. I think it is more important to assure that we remain a viable nation with a large financial "pie" to divide up, rather than a weak one with only a small "pie" and an even smaller one in the future. I consider this to be a matter of national security that is on the same level as protection from terrorist attacks. As for the argument that Congress was able to get it "right" in 1990, 1993, and 1997, I can only respond: What about 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 (just looking at the past twenty years)? And this proposed commission would consist of representatives of both parties of both houses (appointed by the respective party leaders in each body), along with two appointed by the President. So we aren't talking about an unelected bureaucracy here, but rather a body beholden to the electorate.

Alas, the Conrad Amendment, though supported by a majority of senators (53-46), failed to muster the necessary 60 votes to gain passage under Senate rules. President Obama had expressed his strong support of this defeated amendment and may establish his own study commission for dealing with the runaway national debt. But its findings won't have any teeth, as Senator Gregg has pointed out.