Editorial: A debt supercommittee without superheroes
There's a long-standing joke about the legislative process in Washington: What does Congress do when it faces a tough problem? It assigns it to a committee.
Maybe the joke needs to be updated: What does Congress do when it faces a really tough problem? It assigns it to a supercommittee.
Thing is, it's not really a joke.
We don't often editorialize about national issues. Not that we don't care about them, but our focus is on the suburbs, and we feel that's where are primary expertise is and our emphasis should be.
But a crisis is looming in the Capitol with implications that soon could sweep across the land, and it should galvanize us all.
Wednesday is the deadline for a joint House-Senate “supercommittee” of six Democrats and six Republicans to agree on a plan to reduce the federal deficit by at least $1.2 trillion.
As tough as that challenge sounds, that target in reality is a relatively modest goal.
The U.S. debt is currently about $15 trillion and rising. It's increasing by $3.99 billion per day. Per day. That's the level of fiscal threat before us and our heirs.
You could make an argument — and many have — that President Barack Obama and Congress ought to have considerably more ambitious deficit-reduction aspirations.
But $1.2 trillion is at least something. To paraphrase Illinois' legendary Sen. Everett Dirksen, a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.
Even that minimum goal, however, seems unlikely three days from the deadline.
It is a tragedy of our times that despite the enormity of the financial crisis before the country, Washington seems utterly unequipped to respond in a collaborative and altruistic way.
The idea of the supercommittee itself was born in July as the debt crisis nonsolution after near agreements between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner on $4 trillion and then $2 trillion deficit-reduction packages fell apart.
Before then, the Senate Gang of Six led nowhere, as did the Bowles-Simpson commission recommendations, as did talks between Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Eric Cantor.
The supercommittee was to change all that. Why? Because the poison pill included in the legislation setting up the supercommittee supposedly was so onorous to all involved — triggering $6 trillion in automatic defense cuts and $6 trillion in automatic domestic cuts — that reason, cooperation and consensus would prevail.
Only now, instead of solving the deficit problem, legislators are scheming instead for ways to, get this, untrigger the trigger.
Washington has become a parody of itself!
We wonder, is each party more beholden to its special interests than to the country's welfare? Do politicians relish sound bites more than solutions? Has the game of politics supplanted the work of the nation?
We wonder. And we worry that we know the unfortunate answer to our questions.