Executive Orders

Obama to Create Deficit Commission

After Republicans sink bipartisan deal.

Republicans who attack President Obama over the national debt were unwilling to create a bipartisan deficit commission with him. So the president has decided to go around them: He will issue an executive order on Thursday creating an 18-member deficit commission. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform will be chaired by Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Erksine Bowles, the former chief of staff to President Clinton who brokered a 1997 balanced-budget agreement with Congress. “There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress—not one—that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Simpson tells The New York Times. “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other—we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”