I am very curious about this. Joseph Zeballos-Roig from Semafor reports that what the article calls a “bipartisan group of senators” is working on a plan for various cuts to Social Security, including raising the retirement age and changing the cost-of-living formula to gradually increase the cuts benefits 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 clique with the Democrats. So he is part of their 51-seat majority. But this is still a rather strange definition of “bipartisan” since the article at least doesn’t include Democrats.
Both parties sometimes stretch the definition of “bipartisan” to refer to a group of people from one party and a single member from the other. But this stretches the definition past the breaking point, I would say. Semafor has published up to half a dozen articles on this group. But at least my cursory search suggests they all include just those three names and no Democrats.
Now, having said that, I assume that the “group” includes more than three Senators. So possibly there are stealthy Democrats involved in the group lurking in the shadows. Or maybe they have a terrible communications operation and can’t get into the Semafor pieces. Can someone with inside knowledge let us know if there are secret Democrats that are part of the group or if this is the type of bipartisan group that doesn’t include Democrats?
