Kerrey-Danforth, Greenspan, and Other Commissions

Stan and I are in agreement on this one.  Commissions rarely solve problems in Washington.  They're usually created to buy votes to do the very thing that the commission was set up to stop.

Most commissons do important, but obscure, work that Congress doesn't want to take the blame for.  Just listing and briefly describing currently active U.S. commissions takes 67 pages in this Congressional Research Service report.  Before you look, can you name even one commission or describe what any commissions do?

That having been said, I look back fondly on the Kerrey-Danforth Commission mainly because it was one of the few commissions that actually attempted to "tell it like it is."  A good friend, who I helped get his job with Senator Danforth, became the Commission's Chief of Staff.  They did a very thorough, timely, and expert job of reviewing the unsustainable path of entitlement spending, and they clearly presented that in their report, which I am proud to say, I still have on my bookshelf!

However, a quick reread of the summary confirmed my hazy recollections.  The Kerrey-Danforth Commission was created to placate deficit conscious members of Congress who feared retribution from the voters, with good reason.  They had passed President Clinton's deficit reduction package of 1993, which along with the 1990 effort under President Bush 41, led to the surpluses of 1997-2000.  It also produced a big political backlash that cost President Clinton control of both houses of Congress.  The 1994 election broke 42 years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives and 8 years of Democratic control of the Senate. The Commission was so divided and so controversial that if failed to agree on any recommendations.  It agreed on certain "principles," and folded up shop.  The Commission didn't succeed in protecting members from voter retribution, but it did educate many on the inexorable growth of entitlement spending, so I've always felt it was worth it.

The Greenspan Social Security Commission was one of the more memorable examples of rewriting history after the fact that I have witnessed.  Mr. Greenspan's recent memoir leaves out a lot -- like how the commission was hopelessly deadlocked until the last minute -- how failure to agree on a solution would mean reduced Social Security checks fourth months later -- and most importantly, how the solution came about on the Senate floor, not in a Commission meeting.  I was sitting on a Senate back couch in January, 1983, when Pat Moynihan(D-NY) crossed the aisle to talk to Bob Dole (R-KS).  I couldn't make out what they were saying, but I could tell they were hammering out a bipartisan agreement to save Social Security right there. I went home that night in amazement and admiration that they would attempt to hold this deal together, whatever it was, against all comers from both parties.  Back then, we had visionary and politically strong enough leaders to solve some real problems.  They delivered the agreement to Greenspan, and he was happy to take credit where little was due, and it passed Congress and was enacted in the nick of time.