The Congressional Super Committee that was such a big part of Minority leader Mitch McConnell's sucker's deal with President Obama has admitted failure...just as I predicted, here and here. Instead of presenting cut cap and balance, passed by the House and by every Republican in the Senate as a final offer and letting the president take the onus for shutting the government down, McConnell gave the president everything he wanted..including a brand new higher credit card limit.
The way it was set up, President Obama won either way, thanks to McConnell's gutless approach. With the sort of Democrats that were appointed to the committee, they were never going to agree to any compromises. Either the GOP was going to go along with the massive tax hikes the Democrats love - oh, sorry, 'new revenues' - and destroy itself politically or the committee, which like the President favors hollowing out our military and defense budget would just sit on their hands and let the massive automatic cuts in those areas take place.
And the cuts aimed at defense are downright irresponsible. SecDef Pannetta has already targeted the military with over $450 billion in cuts as it is. Add that to the proposed $600 billion and we're talking over one trillion in cuts from our defense budget.
President Obama is channeling his model Tony Blair and New Labour once again. This is exactly how Blair and his cronies destroyed Britain's armed forces.
Even the Republican's craven offer to accept $500 billion in tax hikes wasn't enough - the Democrats insisted on one trillion. In other words, they never had any attention of seriously making a deal.
McConnell and the Republicans who signed on to the budget deal and the supercommittee scam got nothing except a screwing done without the benefit of any sort of lubrication.
President Obama, sporting one of his trademark smiles happily announced that he will veto any attempt by Congress to try and protect our military or defense establishment from any of the mandated cuts. He and the Democrats got exactly what they wanted, more money to use on domestic spending to reward the president's political allies in the run up to the elections.
A number of political figures are pointing fingers at each other in an effort to assign blame, but I put this squarely on the shoulders of the Republican leadership for allowing themselves to be conned in the first place.
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