Cokie and Steve Roberts

The budget outlook is truly dismal. The deficit for the current fiscal year could hit $1.6 trillion, and experts project a tsunami of red ink for many years to come.

But there is a model for how to stop the country’s headlong rush toward fiscal ruin. It’s called BRAC, an acronym for Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. That’s typical Washington jargon, but it’s also a rare bipartisan idea that actually worked. In the late 1980s, the Pentagon found itself with a huge inventory of unneeded military bases. The obvious answer was to close them. But every installation meant jobs and revenue for a local community, and every lawmaker representing one of those communities freaked out at the thought of losing federal dollars.

In a rare burst of self-knowledge, Congress realized it was too spineless to resist such protests. So in 1990, it passed a law creating a new procedure. The Pentagon would draw up a list of installations slated for closure; that list would be passed on to a BRAC, an independent, bipartisan commission appointed by the president.

The BRAC could revise the Pentagon’s recommendations — and the lobbying at that point was furious — but once the panel approved a final hit list, Congress had to ratify or reject the entire package. No amendments, no horse-trading, no political maneuvering allowed.

The result: Close to 400 redundant installations were shuttered during five rounds of BRAC deliberations that ended in 2005. The lesson: Take the same concept, and apply it to an even thornier political problem — the soaring budget deficit.

Normally, we would hate the idea of a commission that usurps the role of duly elected legislators. And many similar panels have tried and failed to force Congress to make unpopular decisions. But the legislative process has collapsed, and the price of inaction is too high. It’s time to try a new approach.

A bipartisan group of senators recently proposed a BRAC-like body to recommend a new set of tax and spending policies. Fifty-three lawmakers voted yes, seven shy of the number needed to break a filibuster. Hardliners on both sides teamed up to kill the bill — and demonstrate, once again, why a commission is now so essential. Anti-tax zealots opposed the idea because any feasible compromise would require significant revenue increases; big-spending liberals yelped about the threat to social spending. Two conclusions are obvious: Both sides are wrong, and Congress cannot stand up to either one.

President Obama recognized this truth and turned to Plan B: a commission created by executive order, not law. He’s appointed two superb public servants to head the effort — Democrat Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to President Clinton, and Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming. Their recommendations are due Dec. 1, and Congressional leaders have promised to follow the BRAC model and bring the measure to the floor for an up-or-down vote.

We are not naive; the chance that this process will produce significant and painful changes in budget policy remains small. But there was a flicker of encouragement this week when Rep. Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, delivered an important speech strongly endorsing the commission concept.

“The real work of cutting deficits is so easy to demagogue that it rarely succeeds without support from both sides,” he told the Brookings Institution, a progressive think tank. “That’s one of the reasons why the fiscal commission must not take any option off the table, from raising revenues to cutting entitlement spending.

And that’s why both parties have a duty to appoint members who are willing to compromise and make tough decisions.”

Hoyer advanced two “tough decisions” guaranteed to save money and alarm his liberal audience: Raise the retirement age and means-test benefits under Social Security and Medicare.

Then he frightened conservatives by voicing a vicious truth: “No one likes raising revenue, and understandably so. But if you’re going to buy, you need to pay.”

Right now, responsible lawmakers like Hoyer are caught in a bind. Persistent unemployment makes it hard to cut spending or increase taxes.

But the day of reckoning on the deficit is looming. In his speech, the Democratic leader quoted economic historian Niall Ferguson: “This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion.”

In an ideal world, commissions are a lousy way to govern. But Washington today is far from an ideal world, filled with politicians from both parties who know what they need to do — and lack the courage to do it. A BRAC for the budget might be the only way to salvage a shred of fiscal sanity.

Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by e-mail at stevecokie@gmail.com..