The Hill News

Republicans will have to consider negotiating added revenues and Democrats will have to be willing to negotiate entitlement reform in upcoming "supercommittee" negotiations, the Senate's second-ranking Democrat said.

"Democrats have to be prepared to talk about entitlement reform and Republicans have to be prepared to talk about revenue if we’re both serious about meaningful deficit reduction," Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told the Chicago Tribune on Thursday. "It’s tough politically on both sides. I mean, it’s as volatile as can be."

According to the Tribune, Durbin said he would like to be one of three Democratic senators chosen to participate on the 12-person bicameral, bipartisan supercommittee of legislators charged with seeking $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. The committee, made up of members selected by congressional leaders before Aug. 16, will include three Republicans and three Democrats from both the H! ouse and the Senate.

Durbin's comments come the same day that Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) predicted that members of the committee will have to compromise on deficit reduction.

"I think that we will see, for instance, some hedge fund managers and Wall Street pay a lower tax rate than a teacher or construction worker in Garfield Heights, Ohio, but we know that those kinds of loopholes â€" I've got to think Republicans will finally will give on those, and I think Democrats will look at what'll we do with entitlements," Brown said on MSNBC.

But Brown said he would not agree to a deal that included raising the Social Security age.

"One place I won't go, I won't go to rai! sing the Social Security retirement age because there are so m! any peop le who work in factories and cut hair and work as waitresses â€" they can't work till they're 70," Brown added.

The supercommittee is a feature of the $2.1 trillion debt-limit-increase deal President Obama and congressional leaders agreed to on Sunday and Obama signed into law on Tuesday, less than 12 hours ahead of when the deadline when the Treasury Department predicted the U.S. economy would default if the debt limit was not raised.

Both Republicans and Democrats have begun mentioning what they want the focus of the committee to be. Democrats have suggested they hope to bring to the table added revenues in the form of raising taxes on the wealthy and closing tax loopholes in the supercommittee negotiations, while Republicans have said they want the focus to stay on cutting federal spending.

"I think the focus needs to stay on spending. This select committee has been tasked with the job of trying to identify those cuts," House Majority ! Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Wednesday.