Overlooked on the Senate Budget?

I linked earlier today to a good WaPo piece by Rachel Weiner explaining why Senate Democrats haven't passed a budget resolution -- mainly that there was no particular reason to do so, and therefore they were happy to duck tough but meaningless votes on one.

I should add, however, one other point that perhaps really might change things in the 113th Congress: the leadership of the Budget Committee. Retired Chair Kent Conrad was a real rarity in Washington. He actually did care about federal budget deficits. A lot. So much so that he once left the Senate because he had pledge to do so if he didn't solve federal budget deficits.

And, yes, Conrad did fight for agriculture programs, so he wasn't a pure budget cutter...but you can be a real deficit cutter even while supporting specific programs, whatever they are; what matters is the bottom line, and Conrad by all accounts really did care about that.

Unfortunately, this put him at odds with pretty much everyone in his party, given that most of them cared a lot less about wheat, and almost all of them cared a lot less about deficits (not to mention that almost all Republicans, whatever they claimed, also cared a lot less about deficits, but that's not the point here).

Anyway, Conrad is gone, and Patty Murray is now Budget Chair. I don't really know anything at all about her views on budget deficits, but she almost has to care about them less than Conrad did, and in most things she's an absolutely mainstream liberal Democratic Senator.

In other words, part of the difficulty in getting a budget resolution done for the Democrats -- especially a symbolic one, which was all that was available in the 112th Congress -- was that it meant conflict with their own Budget Chair. That should be gone now, and may well be part of why they appear to be far more willing to go through the motions on it.

It's still purely symbolic; the real negotiations over the current continuing resolution, over the sequester, and over FY 2014 spending and revenues really won't be affected at all by whether the Senate passes a budget resolution. But to the extent that anyone cares about it, my bet is that the transition from Conrad to Murray makes it a fair bit easier.

Kent Conrad

I liked what Ezra Klein said about Kent Conrad earlier today. I've followed his career quite a bit, too, since I worked for another North Dakota Senator when Conrad was newly elected, and because I'm a big fan of Richard Fenno's When Incumbency Fails, which tells the story of Conrad's predecessor, Mark Andrews.

My comment? If you were to ask me for the list of United States Senators who really cared about budget deficits, my list would probably begin and end with Kent Conrad. Sure, he's not an absolutist about it, and sure, there are other Senators who probably have the deficit reasonably high on the list of priorities, but Conrad, from what I can see, is the only one who consistently seems to place the budget deficit front and center. Now, that's not exactly my cup of tea, so on policy grounds he's never been one of my favorites, but if you care about the budget deficit, you really should be a Kent Conrad fan.

Kent Conrad, Super-Genius?

I had intended to do a post today explaining (again) that the proposed deficit commission is a joke, and is extremely unlikely to reach an agreement because it requires Republican votes, and Republicans place deficit reduction below tax cuts in their ranking of priorities.  But everyone beat me to it.  The only thing I have to add is that I do think that legislative PAYGO, if it's part of the deal, is in fact a somewhat meaningful deficit-reduction tool, depending of course on how it's actually worded.  Almost all budget gimmicks (Gramm-Rudman, etc.) are just exercises in blame-shifting and credit-taking, but PAYGO is probably marginally useful, if you want to keep deficits under control.  The commission?  That's where the blame-shifting and credit-taking come in.

So, instead of laying that out in more detail, I'll just speculate a bit about one of the key players in this little drama, the Senator from North Dakota, Kent Conrad.  Now, if you'll remember, Kent Conrad was last seen, over the summer and fall, waiving around a book on health care and mangling its thesis.  Anyway, I believe that Conrad is, in fact, sincere in his deficit hawkishness.  It was the issue he ran on in his original campaign, and at one point he actually gave up his seat over failing to keep a deficit-related promise. 

And yet by all accounts, Conrad has been the main driver of the deficit commission, which is almost certainly incapable of actually doing much of anything.  Which leads to the question: is Conrad not bright enough to figure that out?  Or is his deficit hawk stance really all for show, even if it's sincerely for show?  I'm afraid I'm right now leaning to the first of those options.