A Super-Bad Committee?

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The bi-partisan Debt Reduction Super Committee is charged with finding at least $1.2 trillion* in budget savings over the next decade and will have power to direct taxing and spending.

Last week Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos wrote an open letter to US Speaker of the House John Boehner (posted here on GMD) suggesting the need and benefits of transparency for the newly formed  bi-partisan Committee. Other leaders and organizations are calling for special fundraising rules, given that lobbyists and other special interests are already at work on the members of the committee. The Sunlight Foundation has an online petition HERE demanding openness for the powerful gang of 12. Sec of State Condos’ call for transparency features

–open and transparent meetings and records regardless of physical form. It is imperative that this Super Committee work in a way that restores Americans' faith in government.

 

Transparency is a good but the forces pushing and pulling the powerful committee will be massive and some problems are baked in to the process. It is not a good sign for flexibility that all six of the Republican members have signed loyalty oaths to Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform and have promised opposition to increasing income tax rates and couple dollar for dollar cuts to elimination of tax cuts. All committee members will be super targets for lobbyists and some of them will have a head start.

Between the 12 lawmakers, there are more than 100 former aides who now lobby for various firms, companies or trade associations, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. And many of them will tap into their old relationships to try defending their clients from the spray of spending cuts that must be enacted.

Looks like the “Super Committee” is Congress’s worst excesses written “super” large. Either our expectations for a fair and reasonable solution must be cut way back, or the pressure on the committee members – and the president not to sign away safety net programs in any resulting bill – by ordinary, unincorporated citizens must be cranked into overdrive.

*corrected

6 thoughts on “A Super-Bad Committee?”

  1. The Super Committee is designed to fail.  It is a politician’s dream.  The committee goes down the tank and the fallback position is implemented – across the board cuts (aka gutless reductions).  Then both parties claim it is all the fault of the other party’s failure to compromise.  And, all politicians are mad as hell (aka HAPPY!) Life goes on, unless you are very poor, unemployed, very sick without insurance or otherwise in need of a helping hand.  Oh, and the rich get richer, the most important reason for the design to fail.

  2. Steve Benen over at the Washington Post is quoting the WSJ on the goal of the “SC” as $1.5 trillion in cuts.

    NanuqFC

    Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

  3. An ethics watchdog on Wednesday urged members of the congressional “super committee” to stop their fundraising while they are on the panel.

    Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wrote in a letter to House and Senate leaders that the solicitation of campaign money by the 12 deficit-reduction panel members could “severely undermine the integrity of the committee’s work.”

    http://legaltimes.typepad.com/…

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