Super Congress: Reps. Upton, Bacerra, Hensarling, and Sens. Murray, Kyl, Baucus, Portman and Kerry
(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Now that the Super Congress has officially
decided to throw in the towel the finger pointing starts, as if one side or the other could, a) make America actually care about the Super Congress, or b) hate one or the other side of Congress even more.
For the record, yes, it was the Republican refusal to consider tax increases on wealthy, and not just to not consider those tax increases, but to insist on making the Bush tax cuts for them permanent, that killed the deal. That much was made clear by Sen. John Kerry on yesterday's Meet the Press:
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?"
Indeed. We should all be thanking our lucky stars for Grover Norquist, I suppose. But for him and his pledge, Social Security would be turned into welfare. As an aside, does anyone remember when Social Security was left out of the automatic triggers because it doesn't contribute to the deficit?
Anyway, POLITICO tells us "Now, both parties are quickly trying to figure out how to turn the committee’s embarrassing failure into a political win for their side." Kerry blames Grover Norquist, which is pretty much spot on. Norquist, in turn blames Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And a whole raft of Republicans, from Judd Greg to Mitt Romney, blame President Obama, despite the fact that Republicans specifically asked that Obama not be involved in the negotiations.
All of this for the benefit of the DC media and the Village, who will tell America what they're supposed to think about yet another failure of Congress. Meanwhile, America is worrying about how to come up with enough money for a turkey to put on the table on Thursday. The deficit? Not so much.