Time to act

The 12-member supercommittee met for three hours Tuesday to hear from experts on reducing the deficit.

Why?

{mosads}The people they called have been giving their views for years. Like us, they presumably feel their opinions and proposed solutions are well-known, or should be by now. 

With just three weeks left before the supercommittee’s Nov. 23 deadline to produce bipartisan recommendations, the panel opted to sit and listen to Erskine Bowles, Alice Rivlin and former Sens. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Pete Domenici (R-N.M.).

All four know what they are talking about: They have held their own investigations of this perennial subject and have authored two separate deficit proposals, known as Domenici-Rivlin and Simpson-Bowles.

Those reports are detailed, providing policymakers with plenty of options from which to choose. If the supercommittee wanted to know what the authors think needs to be done, they should have read the reports. Come to think of it, haven’t they already read them? If not, why not? Many questions asked by supercommittee lawmakers on Tuesday were answered by Domenici-Rivlin and Simpson-Bowles — they didn’t need to be answered yet again by Domenici, Rivlin, Simpson or Bowles.

Perhaps Tuesday’s hearing was scheduled because the supercommittee has been criticized for a lack of transparency. But holding a Potemkin hearing does not fit the bill. It’s more of a sop to those watchdogs who made the facile suggestion that the panel’s deliberations should be held in public. Naturally, this wastes time with meaningless sessions. Transparency is a wonderful thing, but supercommittee success would be impossible if members were denied the chance to talk beyond the glare of media attention. 

In public, everyone has to pretend to be interested when told for the umpteenth time that healthcare costs are a knotty problem that needs to be addressed. Likewise, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf was called to testify for a second time in October; he dutifully showed up, and repeated what he had told the panel just a month earlier.

Thankfully, there are no more scheduled hearings of the supercommittee. 

Last week, Democrats on the panel leaked their deficit plan, and the GOP members quickly countered with one of their own. The proposals attracted a lot of headlines, but did nothing to get the supercommittee closer to complying with its mandate.

The supercommittee’s task might be mission impossible. But its members can guarantee that that is so if they never transition from asking questions to providing answers.