Over at Cato, Romina Boccia has an article giving an overview of various approaches to tackle the deficit. The last serious attempt was the ill-fated Simpson-Bowles commission.

However, Boccia correctly notes that the commission had many problems. The commission's report was not even brough up for a vote in Congress. The process had no way to force Congress to act on recommendations, and so simply letting Congress decide whether to vote for it was doomed from the start in an era of political gridlock and partisanship.

Therefore, she proposes an approach modeled on the BRAC process, the famous Base Realignment and Closure work Congress overtook in the 1990s, which has become famous since.

She argues, convincingly, that BRAC worked where Simpson-Bowles didn't, because of the way it was set-up. The first is that "the BRAC commission consisted of independent experts, not elected officials." More importantly, in our view, was the fact that "Its recommendations were self-executing, so long as the president approved, and unless Congress voted them down in a joint resolution of disapproval—a high bar that ensured action unless there was overwhelming opposition."

We may have to resort to something like this.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Process — A few issues ago, we reported on an idea for Senate reform: that Senate Republicans should condition their vote in their next leadership election on the leader allowing more input from individual Senators on the process. Today, Mike Lee has an op-ed out making essentially the same argument.

#Energy — This may be one of the most exciting bits of news on the policy front in many years: given the energy needs related to AI, Big Tech giants are now heavily supporting nuclear energy.

#BigTech #FreeSpeech — Another bombshell underground report from James O'Keefe's OMG Media, this time a senior engineer at Meta admitting shadowbanning and other tactics to influence political discourse in the US. That stuff has to stop. Period.

#FreeSpeech — Speaking of, the Supreme Court is reviewing a lawsuit against a police officer who jailed a man for insulting him.

#LawAndOrder — After more than three decades, the National Retail Federation has declined to publish its annual report on shrinkage, Retail Dive reports. Shrinkage, of course, is the industry term for retail theft. And, presumably, the reason is that there's so much of it.

#Immigration — DHS has announced that it will give Temporary Protected Status to "any Lebanese nationals who are in the U.S. as of yesterday," reports Fox's Bill Melugin. "The TPS status will last for 18 months, and will allow recipients to apply to work." The policy also extends to "any individuals having no nationality who last habitually resided in Lebanon," which, if we're not mistaken, is code for Palestinian and Syrian refugees. This is, not to put it too mildly, insane. While Lebanon, particularly (but not only) its Maronite community, produces great people and many Lebanon immigrants have made great contributions to their host countries, a huge chunk of the Lebanese Shia population supports Hizbullah. How many supporters or even members of radical groups like Hamas or the Al-Nusra Brigades or ISIS are Syrian or Palestinian refugees to Lebanon? Lebanon is a deeply-fractured society which is host to many different religious/ethnic subgroups that have very different values and cultures. The idea that one would grant blanket asylum to all Lebanese, especially right after an unvetted Afghan tried to commit a terrorist attack on US soil, is reckless in the extreme.

#Politics — Nice catch: Kamala Harris's father, famously, was a Marxist college professor. Less famous is the fact that, apparently, as an old-school leftist, he opposed mass immigration on the grounds that it hurts the working class. Is this relevant to policy today? Not really. Is it funny? You bet.