President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission will have a difficult time reaching any kind of consensus on how to reduce the deficit, according to Democratic Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who serves on the commission.
“This deficit commission that I serve on could not be starting its work in a more poisoned and toxic atmosphere than a few days after the election campaign,” Durbin said on MSNBC this morning.
The deficit commission is a bipartisan group set up by President Obama with the purpose of coming up with a way to bring the nation’s deficit down to a manageable level by 2015. But reaching any consensus amid partisan tension seems unlikely. Bloomberg News reported on Thursday that “the group is paralyzed by politics six weeks before its report is due.”
“To think we are going to have 14 out of 18 come to an agreement as to how we will balance the budget over the next 20 years,” Durbin lamented to MSNBC, “it will be extremely difficult.”