Super committee rests in pieces: A briefing page
| Washington
The super committee is dead. But long live the supercommittee in our round up of what you need to know about Washington’s latest gambit that, it turns out, wasn’t.
Documents and Talking Points:
- Bankrupting America has this excellent primer of what happens now that the $1.2 trillion trigger (of cuts over the next 10 years) has been pulled.
- The supercommittee’s joint statement on their failure.
- President Obama’s statement on the supercommitte’s failure and House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) statement.
- The Simpson-Bowles debt reduction plan that both Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked the president to endorse today.
What do you need to know?
- Marc Ambinder looks at why Obama didn’t get involved, writing that “[h]aving allowed Congress to fail on its own, Obama is not about to take the reins of a process that could further erode voter confidence in him.”
- Why didn’t Obama get in the thick of things? One answer might be that the failure of the supercommittee, the New York Times writes, “has inverted the normal reality, in which spending rises inexorably unless Congress musters the political will to impose cuts. Now, although both parties say they are committed to more gradual approaches, an agreement is required to avoid the fiscal equivalent of shock therapy.”
- The Wall Street Journal’s Gerry Seib wonders “Is there any political price to be paid for failure?”
- Ezra Klein of the Washington Post argues Obama should push for the Bowles-Simpson framework because such a move would “place the deficit debate back on more reasonable terms. He’d take back the initiative from House Republicans. And he’d give a better policy package a fighting chance at passage.”
- Decoder would like to know: Wasn’t it Congress that couldn’t get this put together? Why all this talk about what Obama should or shouldn’t do? We get the point about the President steering the conversation, but, really? Aren’t the people on Capitol Hill adults (and elected ones, at that) too? Tell us where we’re wrong.
The GOP presidential candidates react:
- Herman Cain cuts on “Obama’s supercommittee super failure.”
- Rick Perry argues that “responsibility for this failure lays at President Obama’s feet.”
- Ron Paul argues that planned defense cuts are actually only reductions in planned budget increases and so don’t really count as “cuts.”
- Newt Gingrich crowed that he was right about the supercommittee.
- Michele Bachmann also criticized Obama, arguing “the president and the Super Committee could not reach an agreement on how to put our country back on a path to prosperity” even though the president was not a party to the supercommittee negotiations.
- Jon Huntsman feels America’s pain: “Today I empathize with Americans who are overly frustrated with our government’s inability to accomplish anything.”
- Mitt Romney? Got nothin’. Rick Santorum, too.
Partisan reaction:
- From the left: Daily Kos asks if the military was crippled in 2007, when the Pentagon’s budget was the same size as it could be under the automatic defense cuts.
- From the right: Power Line writes that the supercommitte’s failure may be just as well “because the whole approach of trying to solve our country’s deep-seated fiscal problems with a closed-door, back-room deal is fundamentally wrong.”
- From journalists: They’ve come to rip the supercommittee, not to praise it.
Like your politics unscrambled? Check out DCDecoder.com
