the vote on filibusters for court appointments was a good thing. i think you have to be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. and i do think that it opened the door for mitch mcconnell to be able to do it for donald trump and his three supreme court justice appointments, which all of whom i supported, but i have an idea that not everyone on the panel did. well, to that point, to sort of zoom out for a second, i think one of the things about the evolution and reid was key of this, of sort of moving towards majority vote in the senate, this idea that, like, well, what s good for the goose is good for the gander. that is true. but that s how democracies work. we ve got there s 50 states in the union that function without i mean, i think there s like three or four that have supermajority requirements for some stuff, and most of them function with bicameral systems, majority threshold, and somehow
like that in order to add credibility. the report that we released this morning we have $3 trillion in cuts without any tax increases, coupled with those types of fail safe mechanisms. how would you get those what is referred to as pay go measures to really put teeth in it, to put caps on so that you could not go beyond the spending that s been outlined? there s several elements. one is pay as you go. that keeps you from digging the hole deeper. it keeps you from expanding programs or make new tax cuts when you ve done more than you can afford. you need discretionary spending caps that have automatic enforcement mechanisms. you need to put it in law. you need supermajority requirements to override it. there are things that you can do. you can pass changes for example, in subsidies, for medicare, so that the well off aren t subsidized as much as they are right now. you can pass things that deal with the defense budget. you can pass things that change
you need to put it in law. you need supermajority requirements to override it. there are things that you can do. you can pass changes for example, in subsidies, for medicare, so that the well off aren t subsidized as much as they are right now. you can pass things that deal with the defense budget. you can pass things that change indexing for benefit programs. all these things can be done now that don t have to be comprehensive social security reform. you don t have to do comprehensive medicare reform. you don t have to do comprehensive tax reform. they re not going to get done until after the 2012 election. david, you ve watched this kind of confrontation before, perhaps not this serious. what are the implications? you know the rating agencies, what are the implication ifs they do nothing before the august 2nd deadline? the real implication is that since we re spending $4 billion a day every day including more than we are taking in, the treasury department has to decide who to pay