The top US Republicans in the House and the Senate appointed six lawmakers on Wednesday to a powerful new congressional committee that is supposed to find ways to reduce federal budget deficits by at least US$1.5 trillion over 10 years.
Two of the Republican appointees have a history of working with Democrats. All oppose tax increases, but at least one supports eliminating tax breaks like the subsidies for ethanol.
US Speaker of the House John Boehner, chose the three House Republicans: Jeb Hensarling, Dave Camp and Fred Upton.
Hensarling, the chairman of the House Republican Conference, will be co-chairman, along with -Senator Patty Murray.
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, chose senators Jon Kyl, Rob Portman and Pat Toomey for the 12-member panel.
The panel, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, is supposed to come up with recommendations by Nov. 23. If it fails, or if its proposals are not enacted, the government will automatically cut spending across the board to ensure savings.
If just one panel member crosses party lines, the committee can send its recommendations to the floor of the House and the Senate for up-or-down votes without amendments. If a deal is to be struck in the middle, it is likely to involve Portman, Senator John Kerry and perhaps Senator Max Baucus, congressional aides said.
People who favor a “grand bargain” say they hope panel members will feel pressure to be less dogmatic than usual because of several factors: the recent downgrade of the US government’s credit rating, the weakness of the US economy, the plunge in the stock market and a loss of public confidence in federal officials — what Standard & Poor’s described as the weakening of “American policymaking and political institutions.”
Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group, said the nine members named so far did not inspire optimism.
“I would not call it a dream team for a grand bargain,” he said. “If the joint committee does anything serious, it will have to include changes in taxes and entitlement programs” like those recommended by the co-chairmen of US President Barack Obama’s deficit-reduction commission, Erskine Bowles, a Democrat, and former senator Alan Simpson, a Republican.
Three members of the new panel — Baucus, Camp and Hensarling — were members of the Bowles-Simpson group and voted against its proposal, Bixby said.
Changes in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and tax policy are all on the table for the new panel.
Camp is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which has authority over taxes, Medicare and Social Security. Upton is chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has authority over Medicaid and parts of Medicare.
Senate Democrats on the new panel, besides Murray, are Baucus and Kerry. US Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, has until Tuesday to fill the remaining three slots on the panel.
Kyl, the No. 2 Senate Republican; Toomey, a former president of the Club for Growth; and Hensarling, a former chairman of the Republican Study Committee, are among the most conservative members of Congress and rarely vote with Democrats on issues that split the parties. Toomey voted last week against the bill that raised the debt limit, saying it did not do enough to cut spending.
In more than two decades in Congress, Upton, a moderate conservative, has often shown an independent streak. He supported expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, for example. However, last fall, under fire from conservatives, he tacked to the right in his successful effort to become chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Portman, a House member from 1993 to 2005, was White House budget director and US trade representative under former US president George W. Bush. In Congress, he has worked well with Democrats — on pension and tax issues, for example — even as he has voted consistently with other Republicans.
Kyl, who delves into the details of legislation and policy, is a member of the Finance Committee and participated in deficit-reduction talks with US Vice President Joe Biden in May and June. He has resisted cuts in military spending and in Medicare payments to doctors and health-maintenance organizations.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.