And most have been voted down.
Ezra Klein discusses attempts to resurrect the Simpson - Bowles debt reduction plan and why it was doomed to fail:
On Wednesday, Reps. Jim Cooper and Steve LaTourette managed to put Simpson-Bowles to a vote before the House of Representatives. It didn't just fail. It got crushed. The final tally was 382-38. Twenty-two of the supporters were Democrats, while 16 were Republicans. But overall, the rejection was overwhelming, and overwhelmingly bipartisan.
This was, of course, what the White House always complained would happen if they had listened to the pundits and brought Simpson-Bowles to a vote. Republicans would reject it because it included $2 trillion in new taxes and $800 billion in defense cuts. Democrats would reject it because they weren't going to vote for a doomed proposal that included deep Medicare and Social Security cuts in addition to a large tax increase just to show how much they cared about deficits. Perhaps, with presidential leadership, the vote would have been less lopsided.
But Wednesday's vote — which considered a version of SImpson-Bowles with somewhat less in tax increases -- is at least suggestive evidence that the White House was right and the proposal would never have passed because, in the end, the problem with Simpson-Bowles wasn't that the president didn't say enough nice things about it, but that members of Congress didn't want to vote for it.
The Hill reports that the House will likely pass - on a party line vote - Paul Ryan's budget proposal a day after unanimously voting down a version based on the president's proposal.
