Super Committee a Super Failure

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I called it back in August when the so-called "Super Committee" was first appointed: "It's official — the really terrible idea of a bipartisan "Super Congress" or "Super Committee" is doomed to failure. Let's just call it right now and not waste any valuable time we do not have to waste on this farce." Doomed to Failure: GOP Leadership appoints Grover Groupies to 'Super Committee'.

The so-called Super Committee was designed to fail. This Tea-Publican Congress is incapable of making hard decisions and governing in the best interests of the country. These cowards want to claim that their hand was forced by "automatic triggers" that result in automatic spending reductions.

Only this is not true. Congress must make choices. Those choices cannot be forced upon Congress by some leadership agreement of questionable constitutionality. Congress is the Super Committee. Just do their damn job!

Brian Beutler reports today Why The Super Committee Is Heading For Super Catastrophe | TPMDC:

As of Tuesday morning, betting on the Super Committee to succeed would be playing the odds.

A key member of the Senate Democratic leadership team has openly predicted the panel will gridlock and fail, and placed the blame squarely on Republicans.

As GOP committee members met privately, Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen — a Democrat on the panel — told Bloomberg, “You need to close some of these tax loopholes and you need to generate additional revenue. And so that balance is going to be important. We saw the dueling letters just last week. We had a bipartisan group in the House that said, ‘Look, everything is on the table including revenues – tax revenues.’ And within 24 hours you had 33 [Republican] Senators say, ‘no new net tax revenues.’”

Republicans responded with a trial balloon, provided first to Wall Street Journal editorial writer Stephen Moore.

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Privately, Democratic aides dismissed the offer — which was not extended officially, only floated in the press — as an attempt by the GOP to pretend they’re playing nice. And though Republican aides spoke positively of the idea, they might find that a guy named Grover Norquist isn’t such a big fan.

All of these signs augur for gridlock, with just over two weeks until the panel is required to report a proposal to Congress and mere days before its recommendations must be sent off to the Congressional Budget Office for a final dollar-figure estimate.

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The Super Committee exists because of Congressional Republicans’ decision to hold the nation’s debt ceiling hostage — a bid to force Democrats to agree to major budget cuts. In the end, they got half of what they wanted up front, but punted the second half — cuts to big-ticket items like Medicare and Social Security — to a new joint select committee on deficit reduction: Six Democrats, six Republicans, a bare majority of whom have the power to expedite a vote on a major package of spending cuts, savings, and tax increases through the Congress. No filibusters, no amendments, no typical legislative muss and fuss.

Hanging over the committee’s head is a Sword of Damocles — an enforcement mechanism that kicks in automatically if the panel gridlocks, the full Congress rejects their proposal, or President Obama vetoes it. Republicans refused to allow tax increases in this penalty. So instead it includes cuts to programs near and dear to Republican hearts — including $600 billion in across-the-board, automatic cuts to defense and security programs, and hundreds of billions more in cuts to Medicare providers, for a 10-year total of $1.2 trillion starting in January, 2013.

That’s driven a wedge between the faction of the GOP that cares most about maintaining high levels of defense spending, and the larger faction that has committed to never, ever vote for a net tax increase. Democrats on the committee have agreed in principle to billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other safety net programs — but only if the GOP breaks its anti-tax orthodoxy and puts significant new tax receipts on the table.

It’s a quandary for the GOP — one that threatens to rip the conservative coalition asunder. Republican hawks have even proposed dismantling the defense portion of the trigger if the committee fails — but they would need bipartisan backing and President Obama’s support, the combination of which seems extremely unlikely.

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In either case, failure would set off a year long political fight over the future of the country. Obama and Democrats would focus voters’ minds on the dire consequences of the GOP’s unwillingness to agree to tax increases on even the wealthiest Americans: no jobs bills, big Medicare cuts, big defense cuts and lingering budget deficits to boot. Republicans would continue to claim tax increases on millionaires would hurt small businesses, but most polling suggests the public isn’t buying it. Meanwhile health care providers and defense contractors would raise hell to prevent the penalty from kicking in — and perhaps even pressure their GOP allies to abandon their pledge and raise taxes.

Senate Democrats’ top messaging strategist predicted on Monday that the deficit Super Committee will fail to meet its required minimum target of $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. Schumer Predicts Super Committee Will Fail | TPMDC:

“I don’t think the Super Committee is going to succeed because our Republican colleagues have said ‘no net revenues,’” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on MSNBC.

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Schumer’s the highest ranking member of either party to publicly predict the panel will fail. And his argument is perfectly well founded. Democrats have been explicit for weeks that they’ll entertain some of the unpopular cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security that Republicans want — but only if the GOP ponies up significant new revenue from high-income tax payers. Republicans so far have refused. And as the panel’s Democratic co-chair, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), put it recently, “these concessions would only be made—and only considered—in the context of a balanced deal that doesn’t just fall on the middle class and most vulnerable Americans—but that requires big corporations and the wealthiest among us to share in the sacrifices.”

But Schumer’s prediction cuts a different way in that it turns up the pressure on Republicans, who are already beginning to fracture over the stranglehold anti-tax activists have over the party, and who don’t want to be blamed in the event that the panel gridlocks.

If there’s no agreement by November 23, or if Congress doesn’t pass the panel’s recommendations by the end of the year, it will trigger an enforcement mechanism comprised largely of across the board cuts to Medicare providers and defense and security programs, totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years. Those cuts would begin take effect on January 1, 2013.

Unless and until Tea-Publicans are willing to throw their lord and master Grover Norquist under the bus and abandon their slavish adherence to their socio-politico-economic religious dogma of "no new taxes" ever under any circumstances, there will be no agreement, and there will be no automatic triggers either, because the military-industrial-congressional complex will not permit it. * We are staring at a year of political paralysis due to the Tea-Publicans' inability to govern for the best interests of the country. All they care about is their partisan political interests.

* UPDATE: Military spending boosters are devising a plan to avoid triggered cuts to defense budgets. Conservatives Pushing End-Run Around Mandated Military Spending Cuts If Super Committee Fails | ThinkProgress:

Here’s how it would work: 1) Hope for the super committee to fail, 2) Push doomsday warnings about mandated defense “sequestration,” 3) Get Congress to pass a new law negating the automatic cuts.

In the plan, the “sequestration” — a fancy word for cuts — of $600 billion in military spending could be avoided.

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The strategy is something Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republicans have been suggesting since the middle of last month. Yesterday, McCain, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, reiterated the message:

The sequestration is not engraved on golden tablets. It is a notional aspiration. And those of us — and I think we’d have sufficient support to prevent those kind of cuts from being enacted because of the impact it would have on national security.

Watch the video: