Fire the supercommittee

Folks, I think we’ve been had. Worse we’ve been snookered by a group of guys in the U.S. Congress who are not exactly known for their cleverness. Think about it: we have this oxymoronic supercommittee that has been set up so that if the members fail to do what we ask of them, we are actually the ones who are penalized (through automatic wholesale cuts to government programs, some loved by Dems, some loved the GOP). Shouldn’t the members have been forced to sign a deal that said that if they didn’t reach a deal by the deadline that they would resign? Shouldn’t they actually have some skin in the game?

Trust me, if these dithering poseurs were actually accountable for their own failure to do what they have been hired to do, perhaps they might take the job at hand more seriously. Maybe they are too busy with their insider trading to be bothered with little stuff like the future of the republic.

It’s not like the job is actually that tough. They are only being asked to cut the deficit by the equivalent of $120 or so billion a year for a decade. That may sound like a lot but it’s out of a $3.7 trillion budget. So it’s about 3 percent of the total. And that’s including the radical possibility that we actually consider solving the problem by raising revenues a weensy bit. After all, the amount in question is less than we are spending each year on the two wars we don’t want to be fighting any more in the Mideast.

Can you imagine what would happen to, say, a mid-level corporate drone who when asked to cut three percent from his budget said he couldn’t do it? He’d be canned before he was able to simper his first excuse. And that’s just what should happen to these guys.

To put their bungling in perspective, consider for a moment that in today’s news alone we have reports that historical enemies India and Pakistan have managed to hammer out an agreement normalizing trade relations, that Syria’s neighbors have reversed their behavior of decades and started to pressure the Assad regime to pack it up, that even the Greek and Italian governments are making progress dealing with crises that they have let fester for years. In other words, government officials in other countries are at least showing signs of trying to grapple with tough issues albeit with varying degrees of success.

But here in Washington, the supercommittee and the Congressional leaders to whom they feel they report (they actually report to us, but that’s seemingly beside the point to them) haven’t thought saving the U.S. economy from yet another crisis of confidence in the markets not to mention the other grave consequences of continued fecklessness was important enough to get around to with only a week left to go on the clock. Insiders in both parties are giving up hope for a deal (although my money is still on a last minute faux-deal that is both small and meaningless when scrutinized). And for everyone involved, the expectation is that they can blame it on the other side and go on with business as usual.

If we, the American people, had any sense of urgency ourselves, we would put an end to that complacency in the one way we can. Should this process fail, we should start a significant public movement to vote out the current Congressional leadership and every single member of the supercommittee … and to send a strong message that the next Congress needs a change of management regardless of who wins. These guys have disqualified themselves from further consideration as "leaders." They can’t do it. They won’t. They will have had their shot and failed. And should they not rise to this particularly important moment, we need to recognize that unless we fire them for their incompetence that future generations of congresspeople will feel that they too can pose and pontificate and fail with impunity … thus producing the kind of institutional breakdown that unchecked will do more to undercut American power than two centuries of international adversaries could muster.