Supercommittee's failure was in the cards from the start

John Rossomando  
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As I’ve been saying here for the past few months, the Supercommittee’s failure was a foredawn conclusion the second John Boehner and Barack Obama announced its creation.

Republicans and Democrats have never been as ideologically polarized as they are today. In the past, both parties had ranks of centrists who would cross and vote with the other side. If Ronald Reagan had faced a Congress with the ideological balance of the 112^th Congress in 1981, his landmark tax cuts would never have passed.

Although Ronald Reagan controlled the Senate in reverse of today’s situation, he found he could rely on conservative Democrats like then-Rep. Phil Gramm of Texas to get his plans through.

But the last several election cycles have winnowed the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats as both parties have become increasingly ideological and less regional.

The Democrats’ ideological pull toward the far-left has been exemplified in its embrace of Occupy Wall Street, which has been openly organized by hard-left communists. Consequently, the formerly liberal, now radical, Democrats are ideologically hardened in their support for government welfare programs regardless of the consequences.

The two parties’ reaction to the national debt passing $15 trillion for the first time in history brought this stark reality home. The days when Democrats worked for balanced-budgets and reforming government are over.

The Supercommittee’s inevitable failure will be blamable on the left’s religious addiction to bureaucracy and welfare programs that pay the bureaucrats far better than the recipients.

The GOP deserves its share of the blame too because irresponsible spending during the Bush years undermined the party’s effectiveness in resisting the “tax-and-spend” liberals.

The truth is both sides are too ideologically polarized to work together now that the hard-leftists have replaced the softer leftists like Bill Clinton who occasionally was able to work with conservatives to make a deal.

This polarization is evident in Sen. Pat Toomey’s comments to Politico:

“There are fundamentally and deeply held views across the American political spectrum and here in Congress,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), a member of the supercommittee, told POLITICO on Thursday. “If this were easy, this would have been done a long time ago.”

Comments

[Bill Stanley]

Meanwhile, Czar Obama and tax-spend big-government politicians are driving the U.S. bus closer to the same cliff that Greece and Italy plunged over. During the first 33 full months of Czar Obama's reign, the national debt increased by $4.36 trillion to $14.99 trillion, at an annual rate of $1.59 trillion. The increase in the last 12 months was $1.32 trillion. www.newsandopinions.net