To be exact, he's not complaining about the SuperCommittee itself, but about who Senator Reid picked to be on it. Here's what the old bastard said about Baucus and Patty Murray being picked:
“Max Baucus was on our commission, and it was very, very uncomfortable, because Max — who’s my neighbor to the north, and we came into the Senate together — rarely hardly participated in our commission activities and he was a member.”
“He’s chairman of the Finance Committee and feels a competition with Kent Conrad, which is not good, because Conrad moves and does things, and Max is just holding back,” Simpson said. “He didn’t come to many of our meetings. And when he did, he simply said we have to collect taxes that we haven’t collected, and he’s talking about balance and this and that, but I say to my friend Max, boy, I don’t know how helpful that’s going to be.”
Now that's interesting. Simpson is complaining about Max Baucus on the earlier CatFood Commission wanting things to be more "balanced" in the form of tax revenue. At least Alan Simpson does have kind words for John Kerry.
“John Kerry will be a participant, he will do good work, he really will. I know him well.”
I don't think there'll be gridlock on this SuperCommission, and the Democrats on it will end up voting for spending cuts and major changes to Social Security and Medicare. The pressure is mounting up in the media for another round of austerity in Washington, D.C., as you can see in this New York Times analysis (by Helen Cooper--who is she?) that states that in order for President Obama to be a successful one-term President, that he would need to cut Social Security and Medicare even if it damages his re-election prospects.
I know it's a WTF? and it doesn't even make sense to us, but it apparently does to this NYT reporter:
“The problem for Obama is that right now, the United States is either at a precipice or has fallen off it,” said David Rothkopf, a Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration. “If he is true to his commitment to rather be a good one-term president, then this is the character test. In some respects, this is the 3 a.m. phone call.”
Mr. Obama, Mr. Rothkopf argues, has to focus in the next 18 months on getting the economy back on track for the long haul, even if that means pushing for politically unpalatable budget cuts, including real — but hugely unpopular — reductions in Social Security, other entitlement programs and the military.
God save us from the austerity peacocks, the SuperCommission, and the President's maddening focus on cutting Social Security and Medicare.