The Joint Committee is an admission that each party currently has a view of the size and scope of government that are fundamentally irreconcilable and that neither party is currently strong enough to prevail by legislative force over the other. The Joint Committee is, some ways, proof that the Congresscritters are doing their jobs: Unable to achieve via conventional legislative channels a package that is amenable to both chambers, a mechanism has been created to achieve reductions in governmental outlays come Hell or high water. It’s an arrangement nobody particularly likes, and is liable to produce many unintended consequences if the fail-safe spending reductions are triggered, but given that it’s routinely said around here that the 2010 election was about sending folks to Washington to cut spending, you can’t say they haven’t been trying.

Or, if you want to rant about Congress’s failure to pass a budget, keep it confined to the Senate. As the House actually has been doing its job, and remains on track to have passed an FY2012 budget by the end of the fiscal year.

Upton is the head of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House. If one wants to try their hand at tea leave reading, it could be surmised from his getting the nod that Boehner wants to put regulatory reform on the Joint Committee’s agenda. Most of the players we grouse most about — NLRB, EPA, HHS, DoEn — are under the watchful eyes of Energy and Commerce. And while Upton has made some truly boneheaded decisions in the past, he has done well enough in his chairmanship in the 112th Congress.

Tea leaves are what they are. While not exactly thrilled, the only choice at the moment is to either believe the above is true, or start getting angsty that Upton’s the intended patsy to get the Democrats’ preferred package out of the Joint Committee and onto the floor of the House and Senate.

Is there bloat at the Pentagon? Of course. It’s a federal bureaucracy, after all, and even though its bureaucrats wear uniforms, they’re still bureaucrats. That said, there’s nowhere near as much bloat at the Pentagon as is usually ascribed to it by the Left and more dovish deficit hawks: The first round of Obama defense reductions in tandem with those contemplated by sequestration will have reduced the Pentagon’s budget by roughly 20% off its FY2009 highs. Even at the most bloated of federal bureaucracies you’d be hard-pressed to eliminate 20% of costs without reducing its efficacy or its responsibilities: You certainly can’t do it at a bureaucracy that’s better than most in the bloat department.

So cuts on the scale we’re talking necessarily mean reforming the force structure, scrapping extant capabilities, and/or changing the nature of our military commitments abroad. Here is where so many miss the forest for the trees on defense and the deficit: The Pentagon’s budget is not sacrosanct, except to the extent that it is has a far, far firmer constitutional pedigree than the Departments of Education and Energy. There is, likewise, nothing wrong with cutting the Defense Department’s budget per se, so long as we have arrived at such knowing the consequences they will entail. So, if a policy fight was fought and it was decided that the U.S. should return to a foreign policy of the sort of the 1920s, there would be nothing wrong with slashing Defense spending by 70%, rendering the Army a rump constabulatory force, and optimizing the Navy principally to protect American shipping in the far-flung corners of the world. The deficit neurosis puts the cart before the horse, and entirely sidesteps the necessity of the preliminary debate about what America’s interests are and how they should be protected.

Without that appropriate framing for defense spending policy, cutting the Pentagon’s budget simply to make the math work out is idiotic and reckless beyond all measure. Which is why defense is different from almost every other line item in the federal budget, with the only other two being remotely comparable being Social Security and Medicare. (Because the size and scope necessary for either program to work depends very heavily upon how one answers the question of what the goals of each are, beyond “provide Granny money” and “pay Granny’s medical bills”, respectively.)

The Joint Committee’s work is entirely separate and unique from the on-going budgetary process for the upcoming fiscal year. Sufficiently separate and unique that Paul Ryan opted out of it because of the continued demands of his committee chairmanship as he shepherds the rest of the FY2012 appropriations bills through the House. As said up-thread, the Joint Committee’s work is a complement to, rather than replacement for, the standard appropriations process.

Or, so it seems, such is the line that is emerging from the Republican camp.