Matt Yglesias is backing a proposal by Senator Lieberman that would allow any legislation that meets the supercommittee charged standard (i.e. achieves $1.5 trillion in additional deficit reduction over 10 years, has bipartisan support) to receive the expedited consideration that was arranged for the supercommittee legislation (i.e. no filibusters, no amendments). The idea is to allow a thousand supercommittees to bloom. Here’s Lieberman (via Brian Buetler):

The Budget Control Act said that if the Super Committee reached an agreement it would come to congress and for good reasons it would be considered on an expedited basis, it would not be subject to a filibuster, it wouldn’t even be subject to amendments — it would be an up or down vote,” Lieberman told reporters at a breakfast round table hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “The proposal I’m introducing today would extend that process for 90 days into next year…but I’ve done it a little differently since the Super Committee is gone. I’ve said that if any six members of one caucus, six members of the other caucus in the Senate; [or] 15 in the [both caucuses] in the House…submit legislation that is qualified under the bill, which means that it would achieve at least $1.5 trillion of additional debt reduction over the next 10 years, and of course it’s bipartisan, then it would have the benefit of those expedited procedures.

I suppose the goal of Lieberman’s proposal is to have some “gang of 12” produce a moderate bill that would capture significant votes from both parties in an up/down vote but that might lose votes from both wings. That, I suppose, could potentially be effective if those wings would have blocked a cloture vote on the same bill. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea on its face. The problem, as I see is, is that the bipartisan support requirement of 6 Senators from each caucus results in a potential asymmetry for the ramming through of partisan bills.

If you make the (not unreasonable) assumptions that all Democrats are more liberal than any Republican (and vice-versa), then the upshot of Lieberman’s proposal is that any Democratic ideas for deficit reduction will require 59 votes in the Senate (53 Democrats plus 6 Republicans) while GOP ideas for deficit reduction require only 53 votes (47 Republicans plus 6 Democrats). In effect, you are asking both parties, “Can you pick off 6 votes from the other side?” It’s just that when the Democrats pick off six votes, they are almost at the cloture threshold. When the GOP does it, they barely have a majority. That strikes me as a large concession on the part of the liberals.

Now, each side also has a backstop — the House for the GOP, the President for the Democrats —  and I don’t think the proposal is going anywhere, so I don’t want to make too much of it. But having any six Senators from each side support a bill is very different than having the supercommittee — which was chosen by the leadership — support a bill. And while I think it would be possible under the Lieberman plan for a moderate bipartisan bill to get through the Senate, I think it is much more likely that the result would be a (GOP + conservative Dems) bill that got the votes to pass.

And so it should not be all that surprising that the legislation (S. 1985) currently has four co-sponsors —  Senators Corker, Enzi, Kirk, and Murkowski — and all of them are Republicans.