Hensarling, Murray, Kyl and other supercommittee members couldn't strike a deal. Parties brace for 'super' fallout

Speaking before television cameras at the supercommittee’s packed inaugural hearing in September, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said the panel “has the opportunity to show the American people we can still come together, put politics aside, and solve a problem plaguing our country.”

They didn’t.


Now, both parties are quickly trying to figure out how to turn the committee’s embarrassing failure into a political win for their side.

The Democratic message: We stood up to Republicans looking to gut Social Security, slash Medicare and permanently extend the Bush-era tax cuts for high income Americans.

The Republican counterattack: Democrats wanted little more than tax increases and refused to consider changes to deficit-driving health care entitlements. Both sides are positioning themselves as the party that compromised and sought a middle-ground.

But will this political posturing work for a Congress that had a 9 percent approval rating in one recent poll? Or will it just back fire with voters? Many lawmakers are worried about what the supercommittee has wrought for both sides.

“If they blink, then I think every one of us has to look at the mirror and ask if we’re going to sit idly by and lose our position as a financial powerhouse,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) warned starkly, predicting a renewed effort by the rank-and-file to find a new compromise to reverse the $15 trillion debt.

Beyond the political fallout, there are substantive issues that must be dealt with in the coming days and weeks.

Democrats will push House Republicans to extend unemployment insurance, and the GOP will insist it doesn’t add to the debt. Then there’s the president’s request to extend the payroll tax cut — which some Republicans have been cool to. The Alternative Minimum Tax needs fixing before it hits middle-class taxpayers next year, as does the Medicare reimbursement rate for physicians.

There’s some talk among Republicans of pushing a new deficit cutting package that would couple with year-end must-past legislation. But that would be a difficult pill for most Democrats to swallow without new tax revenues, bringing the two parties back to the same impasse that they find themselves today.

Some leading Republicans are also talking about dismantling the fail-safe created for supercommittee failure: the so-called trigger that cuts deeply from Pentagon spending. That will become a legislative battle in the months ahead.

All this sets the stage for an embarrassing Monday moment when the supercommittee fails to submit its paperwork to the Congressional Budget Office on time.

Aides to President Barack Obama — largely out of the loop and out of the country for the past week — had been preparing a statement over the weekend in coordination with top Democrats, sources say, and he’s expected to pound Congress yet again. The committee leaders are expecting to announce its failure imminently.

“Avoiding accountability and kicking the can down the road is how Washington got into this deficit problem in the first place, so Congress needs to do its job here and make the kind of tough choices to live within its means that American families make every day,” White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said Sunday.

The committee won’t even bother to hold votes on dueling proposals to show where they stand, as some originally thought. There’s little reason for Republicans to vote for new taxes, and Democrats to embrace entitlement cuts — if both plans are dead on arrival and step on their own political messages, sources say.

In fact, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction will not have the Wednesday meeting that the debt ceiling accord called for, allowing the 12 members to head home for Thanksgiving earlier than they expected.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) and Murray releasee a joint statement Monday saying the panel’s work is done. But really, they’ve been bracing for this moment for days.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told a crowd at a fundraiser last week that a debt agreement was a long-shot, noting that he had to be in Florida by Wednesday to brine the Thanksgiving turkey he got shipped there. Top aides to the Democratic and Republican leadership didn’t come to the Capitol over weekend, and neither did most of the members on the committee. Even as committee members said publicly they hoped for a last-minute breakthrough, the Capitol was virtually empty Sunday.

Boehner had not heard from Obama as of Sunday evening, aides said, and the White House refused to say whether the president had done any personal outreach or made any phone calls to committee members at the 11th hour.

Talks between Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) hit a dead-end Friday once Democrats rejected a last-ditch GOP bid to cut $643 billion because Democrats said it didn’t rely enough on new taxes.

There’s also been a change in the mood of the supercommittee. Where they were once cordial and optimistic, the two sides have gone public with the blame game. The distrust between the two sides was evident in a round of Sunday show appearances by lawmakers on the 12-member panel.

“I’ve heard this from Republicans in the Senate and in the House who say to me, ‘The calculation politically has been made by many that they think they’re going to win the Senate, win the presidency, and they want to wait until next year and just write their own deal,’” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on NBC’s “Meet the Press” said Sunday.

“In Washington, there’s a group of folks that will not cut a dollar unless we also raise taxes,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said tersely Sunday.

Both sides believe the polls are with them — it’s easy to cherry pick the polls that back your position these days.

In a POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll last week, only 35 percent approved how Obama was handling the economy, and just 33 percent approved of his handling of the budget and deficit.

But a McClatchy/Marist poll released last week found that 67 percent of voters wanted tax increases on the wealthy as part of the mix, and a CNN poll said that by a 16 point margin, Republicans would be blamed for a supercommittee failure. The POLITICO poll, however, also found that about half of the public said they were not at all familiar with the extraordinary panel — a sign that the American people have either tuned out, or never thought the supercommittee would amount to much any way.

The committee was created in August as part of the compromise to raise the national debt ceiling, with its mandate to cut at least $1.2 trillion in deficits over the next decade — otherwise automatic cuts would occur throughout the federal government. If it reached a deal approved by a majority of the panel, its recommendations would be fast-tracked through Congress and could not be filibustered in the Senate.

Throughout weeks of negotiations, the two sides traded scores of ideas, but the latest rounds of debate centered on a Republican plan authored by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.).

Under the $1.5-trillion Toomey plan, about $776 billion in spending would be slashed, including $275 billion out of Medicare and Mediciad and $161 billion by changing how inflation is calculated to affect Social Security payments. Another $501 billion would be raised through new revenues, including $250 billion from closing certain loopholes and deductions typically claimed by high earners.

“The wealthiest Americans would pay more taxes than they do now,” Kyl said Sunday of the GOP plan.

“From the Democratic side it was the same thing: raise taxes, pass the president’s jobs bill, no entitlement reform,” Kyl added. “On the Republican side, you had the one true breakthrough and that was this new concept of tax reform, which could generate revenue from the upper brackets for deficit reduction.”

Democrats called that laughable, with Kerry saying that Democrats were willing to entertain a range of GOP positions, including means testing for Social Security and Medicare to slash benefits for richer Americans.

Instead, they said the Republican position for demanding lowering income rates “amounted to a line in the sand” they couldn’t resolve, as Murray put it on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

—Carrie Budoff Brown contributed to this report.