Does the country need the Democrats to save Social Security from President Bush yet again?

President Bush just can’t seem to give up on the idea of phasing out Social Security and replacing it with a mix of old-age welfare and 401(k)s.

As has already been widely reported, Bush’s 2007 budget calls for three broad cuts in Social Security.

First, he proposes to eliminate the already-pretty-measly $250 death benefit, which has been paid out for the past half century. The administration says paying this fee to the bereaved is “burdensome.” (Try having a loved one die — that’s burdensome.)

Second, the president proposes to eliminate survivor benefits for 16- and 17-year-olds who are not enrolled in school. (Keep in mind, minor survivors don’t get those checks. They go to their legal guardians to help cover the costs of raising them. Having less money to support those orphans should certainly help.)

Finally, there’s a revision in the way Social Security calculates disability benefits.

So, on its face, it may seem as though Bush is trying to cut at the margins of Social Security since he was shut down in his tracks last year when he tried to phase out the whole thing. But look a little closer. That’s what Newsweek’s Allan Sloan did. And the results were a tad surprising.

What he found was that Bush took pretty much his entire privatization plan from last year and wrote it into the 2007 budget. There’s three-quarters of a trillion dollars diverted from Social Security into private accounts, and along with that, of course, a blizzard of benefit cuts to cover the lost revenues.

Bush would never actually commit to a specific plan last year. But now he has committed in spades. He hasn’t just come out in support for phasing out Social Security. He’s written it into legislation.

Now the question is, what are Democrats going to do about it?

If they’re smart they’ll pull a page from their strategy last year and get the members of the president’s party in Congress to go on the record in support or opposition.

Let’s remember how this worked last year: Democrats united more or less to a man and woman in support of keeping Social Security. That left the president to get his votes only from Republicans. In itself, of course, that wasn’t that big a problem. He had majorities in both chambers. But without that veneer of bipartisanship, far too many Republican representatives and senators just weren’t willing to take the plunge.

The president talked a tough game. But pretty much every congressional Republican in even a remotely competitive district realized that standing with the president meant a very real chance of losing their seat in 2006.

The first member of Congress to signal the retreat was Rep. Rob Simmons from Connecticut. And not long after came Rep. Jo Ann Emerson from rural Missouri. As more and more representatives bailed out, the pressure on those remaining intensified. And as it became clear that Bush probably wasn’t going to stick to his guns in the end anyway, even more Republican lawmakers decided not to put their necks on the line either.

The successful battle to protect Social Security not only saved Social Security, it also inflicted lasting damage on Bush that is hard to overstate. Until that point, congressional Republicans had never bucked one of his major initiatives. The fact that they hadn’t was one of the key reasons many commentators believed Bush could succeed in the formidable task of privatizing Social Security.

Once Bush had suffered one big loss, though, members of his party were never quite so afraid to buck him again.

So what does that all mean?

Basically it means that Bush has given the Democrats another opportunity to do good by their country and well by themselves, by insisting that congressional Republicans come clean and take a position one way or another on whether they support the legislation Bush submitted to Congress to divert some 700 billion Social Security dollars to fund his prized private accounts. Do they support abolishing Social Security’s guaranteed benefit? Do they support cuts in Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment?

Really, Democrats, no time like the present.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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