America is not a toy
Politico outlines how many legislators in the House and Senate have turf worth protecting from Super Congress cuts, and how difficult it will be to come up with some solution that enough of those powerful people can agree on to actually
make it through a vote:
The House and Senate Agriculture committees, for example, will want to defend mandatory conservation, energy and export programs tied to the farm bill. Transportation and Infrastructure-related panels are keeping close tabs on the multibillion-dollar highway trust fund that's up for reauthorization shortly. Defense authorizers won't want to submit to major cuts to the Pentagon budget. And so on.
Yes, it will be a grand political donnybrook. Goodie. And the end result of any inaction by this group of bitter partisans protecting their own particular fiefdoms will be "triggered" cuts to nearly everything, as sort of a preschool-level governmental time-out.
In all this talk about deficits, debt ceilings and "triggers," I would like to briefly point out that of the compromise solutions the two parties could come up with in order to supposedly enforce each other's good-faith negotiations, the infantile "trigger" is possibly the most cynical one they could have dreamed up.
Here we've set up an arrangement by which we may be making steep, arbitrary cuts to things like Medicare, defense, and nearly everything else not based on whether any of those things actually need cutting, but strictly as ploy to hurt each other's political parties. Triggered Medicare cuts to providers might have significant effects for Medicare recipients. Sudden steep cuts to the defense budget (during wartime, we always have to say "during wartime" just so people remember) could have implications for national defense. These things are going to have real-world repercussions, no doubt about it. Neither cut is based on any rational number, it's just whatever number they needed and could agree on to make the deal work.
Whatever pain those cuts may have in the real world, however, was always an afterthought, because the point of those cuts is merely to have something each party can use to hold as mutual hostages against each other in negotiations.
It shows, again, the absolute dysfunction of Washington right now. First we had a ridiculous, non-reality-based sudden supposed panic over "deficits" rather than jobs. This led to a ridiculous self-enforced "crisis" over the debt ceiling. Now even the "compromise" is something entirely arranged as political gamesmanship, and doesn't have a damn thing to do with actual economic problems—we couldn't even manage to get an arrangement that wouldn't specifically make the economy worse, in their efforts for yet another theatrical ploy.
I still remain confident that when it comes time for said trigger to be pulled, we won't be seeing any cuts to defense. It would be politically untenable. Whether the Democrats can squeeze Republicans to similarly exempt Medicare is a more open question, but not impossible. The entire "deficit panic" can be chalked up to an at-this-point rabid Republican party wanting an issue to damage Obama over, rather than giving a flying damn about any rational domestic policy.
Given that, there seems little reason to believe either common sense or sincere urgency over our current economic situation will be returning anytime soon. We're only left to wonder how long and how badly Congress will decide hurt the rest of us in order to continue these asinine, bitterly partisan power plays.