The Other McCain

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Did Anybody Think The Super Committee Was Anything Other Than An Exercise In Pluckin’ That Chicken?

Posted on | October 29, 2011 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Megan McArdle

We’re still where we were six months ago: Democrats are determined to have substantial tax increases, and the GOP is determined not to.
The good news for budget hawks is that there will still be some movement because if the Supercommittee doesn’t come to a deal, then automatic cuts will be triggered. For libertarians, this actually looks like a very pleasing prospect.
The bad news is that $1.2 trillion is hardly enough to address our future budget problems, and there’s no indication that there’s any hope of a bigger deal.

In nautical terms, we may have come to all stop on the main engines as a result of the 2010 election, but we still have way on, and the helm still has us pointing to disaster.

Anybody who seriously thought, or still thinks, that we’re not going to get into some wrenching brinksmanship with a side order of disaster? The mere existence of a Super Committee is an admission that the senior heads in both chambers of Congress are useless. These risible clowns in the Senate have not passed a budget in > 900 days. That would seem to put the 1,000 day mark somewhere around the traditional State of the Union Address at the end of January.

I’m going to have to see if Tabitha Hale plans any protest to mark the sad abdication of basic responsibility on the part of the Democrat Senate.

Update: via American Power, the risible clown Trumka spews falsehood:

Trumka, you are false, lack credibility.

Update II: Linked by The Lonely Conservative.

Update III: Jazz the Mighty picks us up at Hot Air.

Category: Democrats

Comments

15 Responses to “Did Anybody Think The Super Committee Was Anything Other Than An Exercise In Pluckin’ That Chicken?”

  1. JeffS
    October 29th, 2011 @ 5:11 pm

    Capital Hill is one big exercise in chicken “plucking”.

  2. Anonymous
    October 29th, 2011 @ 5:20 pm

    I never had any doubts that they couldn’t come up with a plan after Pelosi and Reid selected their share of the members. It doesn’t matter anyway even if they do come to some agreement without tax increases they’d all be back loaded in lala land just like the “future cuts” they agreed to last summer. the same holds for the “triggered” cuts they mean nothing except for scoring purposes and the cuts to defense can be ignored by future congresses.

     More disturbing the house has passed something like six of the twelve appropriations bills needed. They didn’t pass the others when they realized that the Senate wasn’t going to act on the first six. According to PAN, I think, Reid plans to take each appropriations bill the house sent to the Senate and add the other appropriations to them which technically can’t be amended as they would they’d go directly to the “joint reconciliation committee”. This I believe leaves the house with the choice of either rejecting the original bill they passed with Lord only knows how much new spending Reid tacks on it or reject the whole package and get blamed for shutting down the government.

    I vote for shutting down the Government entirely till January 2013. 

  3. CalMark
    October 29th, 2011 @ 5:27 pm

    If John Boehner wasn’t such a spineless sissy, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

    Period.

  4. Unions and Commies Lobby Deficit Super Committee | The Lonely Conservative
    October 29th, 2011 @ 5:58 pm

    […] weekly video address channels FDR and stirs up envy and hatred.Tip of the hat to Smitty on the first link.google_ad_client = "ca-pub-1395656889568144"; /* 300×250, created 8/11/08 */ […]

  5. Anonymous
    October 29th, 2011 @ 6:12 pm

    With only the House acting with a semblance of sanity, there’s no way to reverse course.  At best, the House has a veto.  But you might as well push rope.

    It really will require both houses and the Presidency.  Especially the Presidency.  For evidence, look at the last couple of years of Bush.  When the Democrats took Congress, the punditocracy was falling all over itself to declare the President irrelevant.  That lasted only long enough for the Dems to try to do something, at which point the tune changed, and they all realized that the President matters, and has power, no matter what approval polls say.

  6. Anonymous
    October 29th, 2011 @ 6:21 pm

    What the House needs to do is quickly pass the remaining appropriations bills, they stopped passing them when it became obvious that the Senate wasn’t going to do it’s job properly. A perfect example of two wrongs not making a right. Further more the perfidious tactic Reid’s using as I outlined above should have been anticipated. Boehner’s one positive attribute is supposed to be his experience.

  7. Anonymous
    October 29th, 2011 @ 6:33 pm

    Maybe.  I wouldn’t call that “two wrongs.”  One problem with doing that is that there will be bound to be stuff that will set of the base and the Tea Party types (e.g., us) that would get passed in those bills.  

    Since none of those bills would go anywhere in the Senate, all it would serve to do is do make Republicans mad at each other and expend Boener’s political capital.  And we already have a Presidential primary for the former.  So really, by not passing those additional bills, they were just getting rid of redundancies in government, right?

  8. Quartermaster
    October 29th, 2011 @ 7:27 pm

    Smitty, we lost steerage way back in 2006, or before. Alas, however, we are off a lee shore with some rather large rocks.

  9. Anonymous
    October 29th, 2011 @ 8:59 pm

    As I understand it, and I may not correctly, appropriation bills are normally divided by Departments or areas of government. The reason the Pelosi congress lumped all appropriations into an omnibus catchall was to avoid individual fights 12 times and make it harder to tell how much was being spent on what. The reason they didn’t pass a budget for 2010 is they didn’t want to put to paper exactly how much and on what they wanted funded during a midterm year.

    The Senate is allowed to add amendments to individual appropriations bills but cannot create them from scratch. If the House had passed all 12 bills the Senate would have had to amend each bill individually, and returned them each to the joint reconciliation committee separately. That the House leadership didn’t recognize the trap they were constructing for themselves demonstrates a shocking lack of nefarious imagination or an assumption that Harry Reid lacked a gift for larceny. What the democratic Senate is doing simply isn’t “Cricket”. That the Republicans are continually surprised by how underhanded the Social Democrats are is credulous to a fatal flaw, that they assume any smidgen of honor in their foes is destroying this country. They couldn’t be anymore tactically stupid if they were in league with the SDs. Food for thought that.

  10. Adjoran
    October 29th, 2011 @ 9:13 pm

    Yeah, that dirty bastard, letting the Democrats take control of the Senate.  No, wait – they were already in.

    What the heck are you talking about?

  11. Adjoran
    October 29th, 2011 @ 9:24 pm

    As John McCain pointed out, there is doubt that ANY of the “sequestered” automatic cuts would actually be implemented, since they would all still have to be voted on again. 

    We knew it was a bad deal at the time.  But there wasn’t going to be any other deal.  Obama and the Democrats don’t give a rat’s patootie what happens to the country as long as they can try to blame it on Republicans.

  12. Anonymous
    October 29th, 2011 @ 10:10 pm

    Meh.  Fair enough.  I think we should bump Congressional salaries by at least an order of magnitude.  But only allow them one week during which Congress may be in session.

  13. Anonymous
    October 30th, 2011 @ 11:36 am

    Boehner was six kinds of fool for agreeing to this nonsense in the first place.

  14. Anonymous
    October 30th, 2011 @ 11:41 am

    Which is precisely why it’s time for a Civil War. The only way to keep a society going is to be able to trust the other members on some level, and the Copperheads are simply too dishonest to live in the same society with.

    This is exactly the situation the Israelis find themselves in with the Palestinians, BTW; is there anyone here who would advise the Israelis to allow the “right of return” to bring in more people they can’t trust?

  15. Schrodinger’s Super Committee? « Hot Air
    October 30th, 2011 @ 12:47 pm

    […] the other side of the ideological divide, Smitty seems to be throwing up his hands in despair before we even crack open the door. He’s responding to some comments by Megan McArdle, who […]