At first I thought the following was an Onion headline.
Super Congress Getting Even More Super Powers In Debt Deal
Sadly, it's not.
Am I the only one that has a problem with this? I don't get it, folks. Congress is filled with intransigent members so let's put some of them on a committee and that will somehow magically work more better?
Even more perplexing is that the right (or at least many of them) are the ones pushing for this. Huh? I guess it is smaller government with only 12 people making key decisions now.
3 comments:
They've done this in the past, with the base closing commission, so this is not unprecedented.
It's not really just 12 people, it's 536 people who will get the final say after those 12 people make a proposal. And as a matter of practicality, it's impossible for any progress to be made without a small committee like this to whack a basic agreement together, that everyone else then approves.
Remember, Madison and three or four other guys basically wrote the Constitution. The others had their input during the process, but in the end it was a small committee that did all the heavy lifting. You can't have 500 people jockeying for attention all the time. There's too much grandstanding by individual members to puff themselves up and too many special interest pressures.
Whether it will work depends on who those 12 people are. If the Republicans chosen are all crazed ideologues or lackeys of the wealthy it will not work. (The Democrats don't have any crazed ideologues anymore, except for Dennis Kucinich.)
If there are two or three somewhat reasonable Republicans from moderate districts that Norquist's slime machine can't threaten to oust in the next primary the committee will be able to come up with something reasonable.
But if they put Paul Ryan and a slew of Tea Party nay-sayers on the committee you can forget about anything reasonable being accomplished.
If it bothers you that much, Mark, you can always vote for Ron Paul.
http://paul.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1902:statement-on-the-budget-control-act&catid=15:floor-statements&Itemid=1
He doesn't care for it either.
Even more perplexing is that the right (or at least many of them) are the ones pushing for this.
Perhaps they see it as their only chance of having as many as 6 people on the left actually admit that the problem is not that we aren't going further into debt fast enough.
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