His Excellency Aethien wrote:
Heh, ok. And in theory?
At the last major budget impasse, Congress decided on a short term continued spending bill coupled with a "supercommittee". Said committee was called that because it included members from both parties of both chambers of Congress. So both Democratic & GOP House and Senate members. The idea was that they would have until a deadline to come up with a long term plan for spending and debt. If they failed, there would be a "sequester" -- fairly nondiscriminatory cuts across domestic discretionary and military spending. The
idea was that the GOP would find the military cuts and the Democrats would find the domestic cuts abhorrent enough to force some sort of resolution. Entitlement spending was left out of the agreement.
Anyway, as you may have heard, the supercommittee failed spectacularly and the sequester cuts went into place instead. Many of the same voices who are cheering the shutdown also helped steer and championed forcing the sequester under the premise that across the board cuts were a great thing.
That alone probably makes this supercommittee idea a nonstarter. If you're dealing with people who are excited to burn the house down, why are you going to enter a good faith agreement with them? All they need to do is torpedo the committee, force another shutdown/default and then they say the blame has to be shared with the Democrats because they were on the committee as well.