Democrats strategize on adding a jobs agenda to Super Congress

Rep. John Larson (D-CT), who has been pushing for a second Super Congress to focus on jobs, has a new plan with the support of Democratic leadership. His new idea is to amend the current law creating the Super Congress to require a focus on job creation. Greg Sargent has the details:

Larson and Dems plan to introduce several proposals next week along these lines to amend the current law creating the super-committee ? and they will ask Congress to pick from among them. One proposal would simply amend the super-committee?s current mission to include job creation. The second would ask each of the four Congressional leaders to appoint one more person to the committee, bringing its membership to 16 ? and create a sub-committee on job creation that would produce a jobs proposal as part of the final deficit reduction package.

Here?s the interesting part: Both those proposals would require that the ?trigger? also kick in if the committee fails to agree on a jobs proposal as part of the overall deficit deal. And both would set a clear goal: The proposal has to represent a credible effort to bring unemployment down to 5.5 percent by 2014. If the committee can?t pass such a proposal, the ?trigger,? which contains defense and non-defense cuts to discourage the committee from failing, gets pulled.

Larson and Dems will next week also introduce his original idea of a separate super-committee. And then, in September, Dems will present the super comittee itself with all three of these proposals, have the committee debate it, and state a preference. Then there would be a full Congressional vote on it.

Larson tells me that both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are on board with this plan.

The major hiccup, of course, is a House Republican leadership that has no intention of making the economy or the job situation better. Which in some ways makes this plan even smarter. As Larson told Sargent, "This will call their bluff."

That's precisely what Democrats need to be doing?putting the GOP on the spot over the thing that is most important not just to the nation's economy, but to the nation's voters: jobs. More of this, please!

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/vdrD3ujiOQs/-Democrats-strategize-on-adding-a-jobs-agenda-to-Super-Congress

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