I am very curious about this. Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig reports that what the article calls a “bipartisan group” of senators is working a plan for various cuts to Social Security including raising the retirement age and changing the cost of living formula to phase in mounting benefit cuts over time. (They also have the idea of creating a sovereign wealth fund to put excess Social Security taxes into.) But the only senators mentioned in the article are Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Mike Rounds (South Dakota), both Republicans, and Angus King (Maine), who is an independent.
Now King does caucus with the Democrats. So he is part of their 51 seat majority. But this is a still a pretty strange definition of “bipartisan” since the article at least includes no Democrats.
Both parties will sometimes stretch the definition of “bipartisan” to mean a bunch of people from one party and a single member of the other. But this stretches the definition past the breaking point, I’d say. Semafor has published as many as a half dozen pieces about this group. But at least my cursory search suggests that they all include only those three names and no Democrats.
Now, having said this, I assume the “group” includes more than three senators. So possibly there are stealth Democrats involved in the group hiding in the shadows. Or perhaps they have a terrible comms operation and they can’t get placed in the Semafor pieces. Can anyone with inside knowledge let us know if there are secret Democrats who are part of the group or whether this is the kind of bipartisan group that includes no Democrats?
