This deficit supercommittee may very well blow up in Obama’s face. At the time the deal was made, the administration and Congress were successfully pushing the “OMG, we need to save the country from the BIG BAD DEFICIT!!!!” narrative. Now, not so much. Instead, thanks to Occupy Wall Street, the economy and the effect it’s had on the 99% is dominating the news cycle, and should continue to do so indefinitely.
So when these handmaidens of the 1% come out with their wonderful new austerity plan, I suspect the response will be very, very negative:
WASHINGTON — With just five weeks until its deadline, a secretive Congressional committee seeking ways to cut the federal deficit is far from a consensus, and party leaders may need to step in if they want to ensure agreement, say people involved in the panel’s work.
The 12-member committee is just over halfway through the 76-day interval from its first meeting to the date its final report is due on Nov. 23, but has not gained much traction. The lawmakers have not agreed on basic elements like a benchmark against which savings will be measured.
The panel’s members, evenly divided between the two parties, spent most of September in a standoff. Republicans refused to budge from their position against new taxes. Democrats said they would not discuss cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare unless Republicans made a firm commitment to accept additional revenues.
The two leaders of the panel, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, have told committee members not to talk publicly about their work. But other lawmakers and Congressional aides privy to the panel’s effort have provided a remarkably consistent picture of the deliberations as the committee tries, in a matter of weeks, to find fiscal answers that have eluded Congress and the White House for years.
A Republican who has worked on Capitol Hill for more than two decades said: “Basically we are going in circles. It’s going very, very slowly. The only way this will work is if the leaders decide they want to get a deal and lay down parameters. Everybody is sitting around sucking their thumb until they get some guidance on what to do.”
i think it won’t blow up in anyone’s face. the supers will remain deadlocked and won’t have a deal by the deadline. that will pull the trigger for the across-the-board cuts going into effect in january 2013. but between the missed deadline and that date, congress will quietly slip in a repeal of the cuts into some other bill they pass. so there won’t be any deficit deal and the draconian cuts won’t happen either. as long as the meta-narrative stays with jobs, no one will have any incentive to bring it up