user: ‘60 Minutes’ has Trump, Showtime has Rosie

Five takeaways from the week in television:

1. Donald Trump announced his first post-election appearance. It will be on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday at 7 p.m. Leslie Stahl will talk to him at his Manhattan residence, so get your sunglasses ready: There’s bright gold all over the place. She’ll also talk to Trump’s wife, Melania, as well as his children Ivanka, Tiffany, Eric, and Donald Jr.

2. The 10-year-old “Big Bang Theory” is getting fusty, but CBS has just announced a plan to hold onto the show’s big ratings once it leaves the air. Yup, it’s a spinoff, specifically a prequel centering on the teenage Sheldon Cooper, who is currently played by Jim Parsons.

3. Many predicted that once Trump lost the election, he would capitalize on the base he’d developed during the race by starting a media outlet of some sort, most likely a cable channel along the lines of Fox News. As that great sage Emily Litella once said, “Never mind.”

4. Trump has his next engagement in place; so does his archenemy, or one of his many archenemies, Rosie O’Donnell. The woman he called a “degenerate,” a “pig,” and a “loser” is set to star in a Showtime pilot going by the name “SMILF,” and it is currently filming in South Boston.

5. Amazon has announced that it will air a TV series starring Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore, to be written and directed by David O. Russell, the guy behind “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle.” It’s still untitled, but I’d watch it even if it were called “You Talking to Me?”

summary: Plus three other thoughts about the week in television.

How Supercommittee Failure Could Be Great for Entitlement Reform

Former Texas Senator Phil Gramm (R.). Image via Wikipedia

I haven’t bothered to write much about the Congressional Supercommittee, that august body that will determine the fate of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act passed earlier this year in the debt-ceiling deal. It has seemed pointless, given the unpredictability of the final result. But yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm (R., Tex.) and one of his staffers, Mike Solon, made a very interesting observation: if the supercommittee fails, and Republicans take power in 2012, a procedural footnote in the Budget Control Act would allow the GOP to make lasting reforms to our health-care entitlements.

It all goes back to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act of 1985, which attempted to impose caps on federal spending. The act didn’t succeed in its ultimate goal of a balanced budget (unless you credit it for the Clinton-era budgets), but it remains on the books, having been mostly superseded by later legislation. According to Gramm and Solon, “When Congress passed the Budget Control Act setting up the sequester process, it also repealed the expiration dates in Gramm-Rudman, bringing back to life provisions enabling the president and Congress to propose alternatives after the sequester is ordered.”

In plain English, what that means is that if the sequester is triggered by a failure of the Supercommittee to produce a deal, might allow a future Congress to pass deficit-reduction steps with a simple (51-vote) majority in the Senate, instead of the usual 60:

But the most important Gramm-Rudman provision revived by the Budget Control Act provides that 20 days after the final sequester order, the majority leader in either house of Congress may proceed to consider a joint resolution that can “modify” or “provide an alternative” to the sequester order. Such a resolution can be amended only with relevant amendments, debated for only 10 hours and can’t be filibustered.

As is always the case with complex legislation, there will be parliamentary debate as to whether the revived Gramm-Rudman process applies to this particular sequester, based on the frivolous argument that the sequester does not require various reports to be filed prior to the cuts going into effect. The old Gramm-Rudman sequesters were triggered by the filing of such reports. Republicans will argue that the reports are a technicality and that the intent of the Budget Control Act in explicitly bringing Gramm-Rudman back to life when it employed the sequester as an enforcement device is clear. Democrats will likely argue that the sequester following the failure of the super committee is so unique that the Gramm-Rudman post-sequester procedures do not apply. But given the clear intent of the Budget Control Act, their argument will be weak.

If Gramm and Solon are right, the consequences of a Republican victory in 2012 would be more significant than previously believed, as a new GOP Congress could, say, block-grant Medicaid on a majority vote in the Senate:

The resulting empowerment of a new Republican Congress and president would be profound. Rather than having to first adopt a budget, delaying real action until the summer or fall of 2013, a new Republican Congress could de-fund ObamaCare immediately and begin to reform entitlements for a year during which they could adopt a budget and use reconciliation to make these and other reforms permanent with a simple majority vote.

I’m not sure why this wouldn’t already be possible using the budget reconciliation process, but I’m assuming that Phil Gramm knows more about this stuff than I do. Perhaps what he’s getting at is that, since the cuts are already specified by law, it’s politically easier to swap out the existing cuts for entitlement reform, as opposed to attempting entitlement reform from scratch. Either way, his op-ed is enough reason for me to be content with a failure by the Supercommittee.

summary:

assistant: I haven’t bothered to write much about the Congressional Supercommittee, that august body that will determine the fate of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act passed earlier this year in the debt-ceiling deal. It has seemed pointless, given the unpredictability of the final result. But yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm (R., Tex.) and one of his staffers, Mike Solon, made a very interesting observation: if the supercommittee fails, and Republicans take power in 2012, a procedural footnote in the Budget Control Act would allow the GOP to make lasting reforms to our health-care entitlements.