What happens if the Super Congress�fails?

Two somewhat speculative pieces today talk about the potential, even the likelihood, for Catfood Commission II to deadlock, and what happens to those automatic triggers. The first, in Politico, argues that the White House would probably be fine with a failed Super Congress.

President Barack Obama showed some chutzpah when he personally issued a rare, bona fide veto threat to the deficit supercommittee, and here?s a key reason why: Failure is an option.[...]

The White House and Congress will get another year to agree to the $1.2 trillion in budget cuts if the joint House-Senate committee deadlocks in November. But on the off-chance that a bill reaches Obama?s desk, vetoing a measure without tax hikes can win the affection of his base and more than a few independents who buy his soak-the-rich plan?all without the messy problem of sparking a worldwide recession.

It?s as close to a sure thing as there is in politics.

Ignoring the "soak-the-rich plan" editorializing committed here by the authors, the basics are pretty much on point. The government won't shut down if the committee deadlocks, or if they ignore his veto threat and don't include tax increases in the plan. If the White House is going to be spending time worrying about what Congress is doing, it should be expending that effort on what will almost surely be another shutdown threat six weeks from now, when we're supposed to have a 2012 budget.

In the meantime, what actually happens if they do deadlock, and the automatic triggers kick in? Ryan Grim at HuffPo argues that those cuts really aren't automatic.

The supposed across-the-board cuts aren't slated to go into effect until January 1, 2013. Put more simply: They might not ever go into effect.

The automatic cuts?known as sequestration?are often discussed in Washington as if they're certain, an inevitability that Congress won't be able to prevent. But on the same day those cuts would go into effect, the Bush tax rates, which President Obama extended for two years, are set to expire, leading to an "automatic" tax hike that is treated in Washington as anything but inevitable.[...]

A lame duck Congress would have two months after the 2012 election to stave off the expiration of both that tax policy and the super committee's "automatic" cuts.

The most likely scenario: The super committee locks up along partisan lines and, after the 2012 election, bipartisan negotiators deal with the tax cuts and the super committee's sequestration cuts, along with a basket of other expiring provisions, in one set of negotiations. Democrats will be pressured by the coming sequestration, while Republicans will be motivated by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. And all of their negotiations will take place in a political and economic climate impossible to predict today.[...]

Stan Collender, a Democratic budget expert and consultant to Wall Street and Washington lobbyists, saw through it quickly, writing a report for Qorvis Communications downplaying the likelihood of the automatic cuts.

"There is a high probability that the super committee won't be able to agree on a deficit reduction deal and that the across-the-board spending cuts that are supposed to be triggered if that happens will NOT go into effect as scheduled in 2013," he wrote. "Federal budget agreements have seldom, if ever, gone the distance. Instead, they have always been changed, waived, ignored or abandoned."

One good reason the committee could very well deadlock and the triggers be essentially negotiated away, Grim points out, is the bipartisan opposition to defense cuts. He quotes Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), who says, "I am very concerned about broad cuts across the board, particularly as it relates the Department of Defense." Another factor is that budget committees are often irrelevant because of the simple fact that one Congress can't dictate the work of the next. What's cut by the 112th Congress can be restored by 113th, though certain policies (like the Bush tax cuts) are harder politically to overturn than others.

Nonetheless, the Catfood Commission II members could share the "wistful" hopes for a grand bargain, and might very well find a path that, in Mike Lux's words, "delights lobbyists and inside-the-Beltway pundits, but just ends up enraging everyone else?sort of like the lawmakers a couple decades back who were congratulating themselves on their grand bipartisan deal on catastrophic coverage for seniors, but went home to find seniors surrounding and beating on their cars."

So there's no guarantee of a Super Congress deadlock, and depending on just how wistful President Obama is about that grand bargain, a lot of damage could still be done.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/KpvxWZkrFB4/-What-happens-if-the-Super-Congress fails-

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