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… is basically throwing in the towel and calling it quits since none of the members can reach any type of agreement on budget cuts and spending. I’m shocked, aren’t you? Oh, I want my money back.
Many of us who actually pay attention to our screwed-up, bought and paid for government officials from both of the parties, did not expect to much to come out from the congressional super-zeros in the first place, and we have not been disappointed.
It has been fun over the last 2 days watching the circus on the Sunday news shows pointing their fingers at the guy across the aisle. Politicians are much like hard-core drunks and drug addicts as they never accept blame for anything, it’s always someone else’s fault. The Republicans share most of the fault with coming up with no bills because of the usual squabbling over tax increases. The Kochpublican Party is not going to allow those wealthy “ job creators “ to pay higher taxes just to help with the deficit.
Sen. John Kerry was on Sunday’s Meet the Press and had this to say:
DAVID GREGORY: In The Wall Street Journal, editorializing, the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote this on Friday: "How could Democratic leaders defend deep reductions in the military and cuts in the domestic programs as they are vital investments, when they block reforms that would reduce the growth rate of the major entitlements, which, even under the House GOP plan, would still grow by more than 50 percent over the next decade? Sooner or later, Democrats must confront the reality that their unwillingness to slow entitlement spending will require shrinking everything else the government spends money on." Senator, my reporting tells me that, in fact, Republicans offered Democrats to miens [sic] test Social Security and Medicare as part of this discussion, that would actually hit the rich, and Democrats said, "We don't want to do that."
SEN. JOHN KERRY: Not true. Not true. We accepted. We not only accepted that, David, we put every single sacred cow on the table. They know, they know, that they could have had many things that a lot of us, you know, hate to even talk about publicly, because we're going to get—people are going to say, "What? You guys were thinking of doing all those things?"
The blogs are adding their 2 cents worth to the continuous smack-down of the super-congress’s failure to fix anything despite not having to put up with filibusters, added amendments, and the like.
The congressional “super committee” stumbled its way toward failure Sunday, with final staff-level discussions focusing mostly on how the panel should publicly admit that lawmakers could not meet their mandate of shaving $1.2 trillion from the federal debt.
Rather than making a final effort at compromise, members of the special deficit-reduction committee spent their final hours casting blame and pointing fingers...
But one thing about this fiasco that has so far gone mostly unmentioned in the traditional media is that under the statute that created the Super Committee, missing the November 23 deadline doesn't break up the band, nor does it absolve it of its charge. It only removes their "super" powers, that is, their ability to shield their bill from amendments and the filibuster—which, we might note, they were able to magically(1) eliminate when they wanted to.
Among the many faults of the filibuster is that it distorts our ability to hold legislators accountable. If, going into a vote, everyone knows there's little or no chance of getting 60 votes in the upper chamber, the votes cast by Representatives and Senators alike are difficult to read, since they're all cast in a context in which no one really expects the bill to become law. It's an easy thing to vote to pacify certain constituencies at home by supporting a bill you're personally less than thrilled with if you know it isn't going anywhere. Similarly, it's easy to take a "bold" stance athwart history if you know "doing the right thing" won't get you anywhere, anyway.
So it's very interesting to me that even when the Very Serious People of Washington clear a pathway through the Conventional Wisdom for the Congress to take extraordinary measures to remove the menace of the filibuster, it still doesn't work. How strange that the Congress, stripped of the familiar shield of impenetrable process that usually deflects culpability in cases of failure and given the opportunity to take the tough votes openly and accountably, has opted not to produce any bill at all.
So basically, the super congress is just one more waste of taxpayer dollars by the morons in Washington, D.C. Since we have paid for this fiasco, can we write it off on our 2011 taxes since the product was deformed and non-productive?
