Senate majority leader Harry Reid picked his three representatives to the twelve congressional member supercommittee yesterday, selecting Max Baucus, John Kerry, and Patty Murray. The first two choices make sense: Baucus is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Kerry was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004 and, as his website describes, “holds senior positions on the Finance, Commerce, and Small Business Committees.”
But Reid’s choice of Murray seems, as the boss wrote yesterday, “crassly political and partisan.” Murray is chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and “has little in the way of widely recognized budget or economic expertise (like her fellow appointee, Max Baucus), and she’s not an elder statesman (like the other appointee, John Kerry),” the boss wrote. “But her fundraising for the DSCC sure won’t be hurt by the impression that she’s now an awfully important person for corporations and individuals to cozy up to.”
