Admitting gridlock was at hand, lawmakers on the so-called super committee cast blame and pointed fingers at one another Sunday as the panel’s leaders prepared to formally acknowledge their failure early this week, bracing for the reaction from financial markets.
Using the weekly Sunday political news shows as their outlet, Republicans and Democrats on Congress’s special deficit committee did not officially throw in the towel on their mandate of finding $1.2 trillion in savings before Thanksgiving. However, most of the lawmakers spoke of their efforts in the past tense and said it would take something akin to a miracle to reach a deal, which unofficially must be unveiled before midnight Monday to meet the panel’s parliamentary rules.
“It wasn’t so much of a failure as it was a failure to seize an opportunity. . . . This nation better seize another one or we will be in big economic trouble,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), the 12-member panel’s GOP co-chairman, said on “Fox News Sunday” of the stalemate.
His Democratic counterpart, Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), remained slightly more optimistic but she has already begun to talk about future efforts for Congress to tackle the federal government’s swelling debt, which topped $15 trillion last week. “I believe strongly that we still have the capability to come together to solve this problem,” she said. “If the supercommittee can’t do it, then I hope that Congress will. In fact, I’m committed to solving this. You can’t just ignore this crisis.”
The lawmakers, six Democrats and six Republicans, had been tasked with finding the savings from future borrowing by the Treasury — or else a punitive set of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts would kick in at the start of 2013, with half coming from national security budgets. Those automatic cuts should be enough to assuage jittery financial markets, which have been on a roller-coaster ride since the summer’s debt standoff in the United States and the struggle to tame even greater fiscal quagmires in Europe.
However, the failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, as the supercommittee is formally known, comes amid bipartisan talk of turning off portions of the trigger of automatic cuts. In addition, after the summer-long battle over the debt ceiling, one ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, downgraded U.S. debt based on “America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective.” This latest gridlock came after the supercommittee was given unprecedented parliamentary power — any plan approved with at least seven votes was guaranteed a straight up-or-down vote in the House and Senate before Christmas — so the sentiment of a dysfunctional federal government is likely to only solidify.
“I don’t know what the impact on the market will be,” Hensarling said. “I would hope there wouldn’t be an adverse impact in the sense that the American people are still going to get the deficit reduction that was contemplated under the law. But it is a huge blown opportunity, and as a nation, we are on borrowed time.”
Members of the panel are expected to announce as soon as Monday that they have been unable to reach an agreement as they remain deadlocked over the parties’ perennial differences on taxes and entitlement reform. During the Sunday show appearances, members of the committee did not appear together, instead having Republicans go first, followed by a Democrat. No negotiating sessions — either in person in the Capitol or by conference call — are scheduled for Sunday.
Asked by Fox News channel’s Chris Wallace how he expects the end of the panel’s work to play out, Hensarling responded simply, “I don’t know.”
“I’m going to be waiting all day,” Murray said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I’ll be at the table, as I’ve been, willing to talk to any Republican who says, ‘Look, my country is more important. This pile of bills is not going to go away. The challenges that we have is not going to disappear. We need to cross that divide.’ I’m ready. I’m waiting. Today I’ll be at the table, all night long. We have a few hours left.”
With failure imminent, members on both sides of the aisle sought to blame the other for the lack of a deal. Hensarling argued that “it’s not about assigning blame, but we are unaware of any Democratic offer that didn’t include at least a $1 trillion tax increase on the American economy.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) blamed the committee’s failure on Democratic reluctance to cut into popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms,” Kyl said, arguing that Democrats were the roadblock to a deal. “They weren’t going to do anything without raising taxes.”
Kyl said that Republicans had been the one party willing to alter a cherished policy position, with a plan from Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) that offered $300 billion in new taxes.
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said Republicans had blocked the committee’s work by demanding an extension of Bush-era tax cuts and refusing to consider significant tax increases on wealthier people.
Kerry said Democrats were willing to sacrifice their priorities, by offering cuts in programs such as Medicare. Following a familiar Democratic line of attack, he blasted Republicans for refusing that kind of deal, blaming their loyalty to a no-tax-increases pledge made to antitax activist Grover Norquist.
“We’re here all day. We are ready to do 1.2 trillion” in overall cuts to the deficit, Kerry said. “We’re ready to do it, if they will give up their insistence on the Bush tax cuts.”