After months of bipartisan debt-reduction talks, the Super Committee said Monday that it will be unable to agree on terms to save $1.2 trillion over 10 years by tonight’s midnight deadline. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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“Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve,” a statement from co-chairs of the committee read.
The panel had until midnight to come up with a plan for reducing the federal debt by $1.2 tillion over 10 years or face automatic cuts, called “sequestration.” Failure to do so would violate the law that demanded that the Congressional Budget Office come up with a fiscal evaluation of the plan and give Congress two days to review it before the Nov. 23 deadline. The task was supposed to be wrapped up by Dec. 23 with an unamended vote on the package.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., a panel member, called the committee’s outcome an “opportunity missed” in a statement.
“Many will portray this failure as the inevitable consequence of two partisan sides refusing to give ground,” Van Hollen said. “Blaming both sides equally will be the simple storyline and the path of least resistance.”
A last-ditch meeting of lawmakers ended Monday afternoon with no smiles, no comments, but some vivid body language. Even a visit to the White House by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., co-chairwoman of the panel of 12 came and went without comment.
For some, the latest news comes as no surprise.
The sequester was designed and voted on by both parties and signed by the president, “specifically to be onerous,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. “It was designed so that it never came to pass.”
Carney added that despite President Obama’s willingness “to take extraordinary steps and to bring his party along with them … in the end, Republicans walked away from that deal,” he added.
But that’s not how Republican lawmakers see it.
“The Republican House laid out a good plan. The president, except for his irresponsible budget and the Republican Senate, has done nothing to lay out a plan that can be analyzed by the American people,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee.
“The commander-in-chief is absent from battle,” he told Fox News.
Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., said Congress should consider turning the negative into a positive.
“I’m deeply disappointed by the failure of the Super Committee to find an agreement for at least $1.2 trillion in cuts,” he said in a statement. “But the question now is can we still find a better solution than the across-the-board cuts that have already been agreed to and I think we can. What the Congress cannot do is to ignore the August agreement for cutting the deficit no matter how difficult that might be. That would be fundamentally dishonest.”
