Richards Panel Chair

Deficit panel will have GOP chairmen, freshmen

Republican leaders in Congress today chose a mix of party leaders, veteran committee chairmen and newcomers to serve on the special committee that will try to find another $1.5 trillion to cut from budget deficits.

House Speaker John Boehner chose a member of his leadership team, Texan Jeb Hensarling, to co-chair the panel with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington. Hensarling is chairman of the House Republican Conference, the No. 4 leadership post.

Boehner also named committee chairmen Dave Camp and Fred Upton, both of Michigan, apparently for their expertise on the entitlement programs Republicans say must be cut to balance the budget.

Camp chairs the Ways and Means Committee, with jurisdiction over taxes, Medicare and Social Security. Upton chairs Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's picks were more intriguing: His No. 2, Jon Kyl of Arizona, is a natural, given he was part of the negotiations led by Vice President Biden that preceded the deficit-cutting deal signed by President Obama last week.

But McConnell also picked two newcomers to the Senate with vast economic expertise, Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey and Ohio's Rob Portman.

Both are former House members. Toomey used to run the conservative Club for Growth, while Portman served as President George W. Bush's budget director and trade representative.

"My main criteria for selecting members was to identify serious, constructive senators who are interested in achieving a result that helps to get our nation's fiscal house in order," McConnell said. "That means reforming entitlement programs that are the biggest drivers of our debt, and reforming the tax code in a way that makes us more competitive and leads to more American jobs. The goal is to achieve a result that convinces Americans and the world that we're committed as a nation to prosperity for all our citizens.

All told, the six Republicans offer a broad array of the party, from stalwart conservatives such as Kyl, Hensarling and Toomey to more moderate lawmakers such as Portman and Upton.

Notably absent from the panel are the chairmen of the two budget committees, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota.

Ryan said he asked that Boehner not appoint him because he wants to focus his attention this fall on changes to the budget process.

"This past year has shown that the federal budget process is more broken than ever and needs to be reformed," he said. "If we are truly going to put the country's fiscal house in order, it will not be enough to temporarily reduce what Washington spends. We must permanently reform the process by which working Americans' hard-earned tax dollars are spent.

Visible Evidence » Blog Archive » Workshop report: The future of ...

8:56 AM, August 11. NYU Cinema Studies professor Richard Allen, seated in one of the green velvet seats in the Michelson Theatre, remarks to me that he is surprised to see the room only half full. I agreed. Looking at the program, this, the first panel of the first session of the first day of the eighteenth edition of the conference, with its sweeping title,  “The Future of Documentary Studies ” (workshop in parenthesis) seemed positioned to begin VE18 with a thought-provoking bang. Perhaps it was too early for the VE18 crowd?

As it turned out, it was not.  An alert group of attendees, some with suitcases in tow and most clutching cups of coffee,  filled the room minutes later and continued to trickle in as the workshop conversation commenced. By the time panel chair Roger Hallas finished his opening remarks, dozens were sitting on the floor in the aisle, ballpoint pens and iPads in hand.

Hallas opened the workshop/panel with a call for greater interdisciplinary movement in the field of documentary studies as it continues to develop.  Faye Ginsburg called on scholars to embrace “the new world of infrastructure” and to look off-screen at the shifting social practices that are reshaping documentary form and practice.

Scott MacDonald suggested that we need more scholarship that guides us through nature films and other moving images in the prolific archive of the fascinating-but-understudied.  He urged scholars to accept the fundamental overlap between the spheres of documentary film history and avant-garde film history and thus seriously oblige themselves to saving struggling distributors, like Canyon Cinema,  “that make the broadest understanding of this work possible.”

Alisa Lebow, after joking to the crowded theatre that she “can’t assure you that I’d be in this room if I wasn’t on this panel,”  went on to mount a serious challenge to disciplinary traditionalist thinking, urging documentary studies—if it is indeed moving toward disciplinality—to fully accept and institutionally inscribe the integration of film practice and film research. Really, honestly, why aren’t we going 2.0 with our dissertations?