Today, a proposal by Sens. Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Kent Conrad (D-ND) to create a statutory commission charged with proposing ways to rein in the country’s deficit failed to garner sixty votes in the Senate, despite the endorsement of President Obama. This comes after the news last night that Obama’s State of the Union tomorrow will include a proposal to freeze “non-security” discretionary spending at 2011 levels for 2012 and 2013.

A few Republicans have voiced cautious support for Obama’s spending freeze (including, of course, Sen. John McCain), but on Fox News today, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) criticized the move for having no substance. Shelby would prefer a deficit commission, and his version is possibly the most bizarre that I’ve heard yet:

I think [the spending freeze is] more politics than substance. What we really need is a meaningful, citizens, presidential people to put together a commission, not to raise taxes to balance the budget but to cut programs. Everything should be involved. But that’s going to take a lot of political will, it has to start with the President, and it would have to end up on Capitol Hill. We’re not there, this proposal there, goes nowhere like that.

Watch it:

Yikes. So real action on the deficit will come from a commission of “citizens” and “presidential people” (whoever that might be), who set out to balance the budget solely by cutting programs? And “everything should be involved,” except revenue? This is the epitome of an idea that is more politics than substance.

Even though balancing the budget with spending cuts alone is simply impossible, Shelby is just the latest in a line of Republican lawmakers and conservative activists who want to see a commission that is explicitly barred from considering tax increases. In an interview with CNS News, former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) actually chided Republicans for taking this view. “I’m sorry that some Republicans think otherwise, but I was there [in the Senate] a long time, and I don’t think you can do spending [cuts] alone…It’s got to be a package, and – to my way of thinking – it’s got to have taxes on the table,” he said. Former Reagan official Bruce Bartlett agreed, writing “the idea that revenues should be completely off the table is simply insane.”

Exempting entitlements and defense spending, “the rest of the budget needs to be cut by 51 percent to have a balanced budget in 2014, or by 27 percent to get [the deficit] to 2 percent of GDP.” So it’s really no wonder Shelby wants to outsource that kind of drastic gutting to somebody else, rather than pin his own name on it.

Last week, the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden penned a piece explaining how to spot a deficit peacock, which is a faux deficit hawk who is more interested in scoring political points and ceaselessly harping about the deficit than actually making any of the necessary choices to bring the country’s long term budget under control.

In the piece, Linden wrote that those who “say that the solution is to simply freeze discretionary spending are just peddling fiscal snake oil,” as “a spending freeze would accomplish extremely little in the way of measurable deficit reduction”:

Freezing discretionary spending, the spending that Congress reappropriates every year, at current levels will similarly yield only very small budgetary savings. The federal government spent a bit more than $625 billion on non-defense discretionary programs in 2009. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, in five years, the federal government will spend about $660 billion on the same programs. Freezing non-defense discretionary spending at current levels would therefore only produce a total savings of $35 billion in 2015. That year, the budget deficit is expected to be around $760 billion. Saving $35 billion would solve less than 5 percent of the problem.

Well, as of last night, President Obama plans to implement a spending freeze of sorts, which would cap “non-security” discretionary spending in 2012 and 2013 at the 2011 level. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, and TPM’s Brian Beutler all noted the proximity of Linden’s paper and Obama’s pronouncement. Linden provided this statement to The Wonk Room:

If this freeze on “non-security” discretionary spending ends up being the sum total of the President’s plans for long-term deficit reduction, then it falls far short. Non-defense discretionary spending is not the source of the problem and it won’t be a major part of the solution. But if this policy comes as part of a larger deficit-reduction effort that includes reducing tax expenditures, getting to a more sustainable national security budget, enacting health reform, and finding ways to increase overall revenues, then it could be useful as one small piece of a much larger puzzle. The math is clear, however. We simply can’t get from here to balance just on the back of domestic discretionary programs.

It really can’t be emphasized enough how little can be accomplished in terms of deficit reduction by looking only at discretionary spending. Exempting entitlements and defense spending, which is what the President’s freeze does, “the rest of the budget needs to be cut by 51 percent to have a balanced budget in 2014, or by 27 percent to get [the deficit] to 2 percent of GDP.” If Obama is really serious about deficit reduction — and wants to avoid joining Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), former congressman Harold Ford Jr., and a host of others in the peacock caucus — he needs to push for health care reform, allow the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire, and put cuts in defense spending on the table. There’s simply no other way to do it.

Jared Bernstein, Vice President Biden’s Chief Economist, responded to some of the criticism aimed at the administration by saying that the administration will be “making sure that the freeze either holds steady or increases those parts of the discretionary budget that support jobs and income security for folks who need them, while whacking the wasteful subsidies that support lobbyists and special interests.” That sounds nice, but Bernstein noticeably did not point to defense spending or the undeniable need for more revenue.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. The attack occurred while she was out with a “small group of Halliburton firefighters,” just four days after her arrival in Iraq. After taking a few sips of her drink, she later woke up in the barracks, “naked” and “severely beaten.” Her “breasts were so badly mauled that she is permanently disfigured.”

In an apparent attempt to cover up the incident, the company then put her in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” Even more insultingly, the DOJ resisted bringing any criminal charges in the matter.

Jones tried to sue the company for failing to protect her, but KBR argued that Jones’ employment contract — created for the company under the tenure of then-CEO Dick Cheney — warranted her claims being heard in private arbitration, without jury, judge, public record, or transcript of the proceedings. Basically, KBR argued that Jones’ brutal rape was a workplace injury — nothing more. But in September, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Jones. “Jones’ allegations do not ‘touch matters’ related to her employment, let alone have a ‘significant relationship’ to her employment contract,” wrote the court.

KBR is now petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling. The contractor is personally going after Jones’ integrity to argue that she shouldn’t have a fair and open hearing. Stephanie Mencimer from Mother Jones reports:

On Jan. 19, it petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision allowing Jones to press her case in a civil court rather than in arbitration. Among its many arguments in favor of a high court hearing: that Jones is a relentless self-promoter who has “sensationalize[d] her allegations against the KBR Defendants in the media, before the courts, and before Congress.” … KBR also suggests that much of Jones’ story is fabricated. The company says in a footnote, “Many, if not all, of her allegations against the KBR Defenandants are demonstrably false. The KBR Defendants intend to vigorously contest Jones’s allegations and show that her claims against the KBR Defendants are factually and legally untenable.”

The Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010 signed into law by President Obama in December contained an amendment by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) — inspired by Jones’ story — that prohibits defense contractors from restricting their employees’ abilities to take workplace discrimination, battery, and sexual assault cases to court. Mencimer notes that in its petition, KBR is “clearly miffed about the Franken Amendment, which it credits Jones with getting passed.”

Late yesterday, the Obama administration announced that in Wednesday’s State of the Union Address, President Obama will call for a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending. The freeze — which will keep fiscal year 2012 and 2013 spending at the 2011 level — is designed to save $250 billion over ten years, and will “exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

So it seems that Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D-IN) estimate that “there’s a fighting chance” of Obama proposing a freeze has been proven correct. Of course, during the Presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proposed a similar spending freeze, which Obama repeatedly condemned as an “example of unfair burden sharing,” and “using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.” Here’s a compilation placed on YouTube yesterday of Obama scoffing at a spending freeze in all three presidential debates:

The administration’s contention is that, unlike McCain’s proposed freeze, this operates more like a spending cap, with some programs’ funding going up and others down. As Matthew Yglesias put it, Obama is “aiming for what you might call a ‘cut and invest’ strategy — slashing certain programs and boosting others. And I think anyone who looks at it would have to admit that there is, in fact, a lot of discretionary spending on programs of little value.”

But still, many economists have blasted the plan for its potentially anti-stimulative effects and its focus on spending that is not the root cause of the country’s long-term deficits. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote that the freeze is “appalling on every level…shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said that the freeze “will make it impossible for [Obama] to do much of anything for the middle class that’s important.” U.C. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong added “this is a perfect example of fundamental unseriousness: rather than make proposals that will actually tackle the long-term deficit…come up with a proposal that does short-term harm to the economy without tackling the deficit in any serious and significant way.”

And at its core, Obama’s decision cedes to the right-wing both the idea that blanket cuts are necessary and the notion that cuts should be focused on domestic programs while defense spending goes untouched. And already, the right-wing is claiming the freeze as a victory, with the National Review’s Jim Geraghty writing, “if the arguments in the coming years are between spending freezes and spending cuts, then we’ve already won.”