The U.S. Congress has an approval rating of 13, which ties the historic low, according to a recent Gallup poll. That number should be heading south again soon, and this time it ought to dip to single digits.
The disapproval rating of 83 percent is a new record.
There has been much disapproval of America’s legislative branch for many years, but the formation of the debt “super committee,” one more in a long line of Congressional debacles, might just send the approval rating plummeting toward zero.
This is not about Democrats. This is not about Republicans. This is not about the Progressive Caucus. This is not about the tea party. This is not about the Black Caucus. This is not about the Hispanic Caucus.
This is not about any faction of Congress; it is about all of Congress.
What these 535 elected officials are doing serves none of us well.
Its one more group formed to half-step and not do anything of real consequence, while at the same time covering their behinds so they won’t be punished by voters for each of their individual decisions.
This 12-member “super committee,” six Democrats and six Republicans are supposed to come up with $1.5 trillion in cuts in federal spending—tax cuts are a form of government spending and tax hikes are one tool to cut that kind of spending—by Thanksgiving.
If they don’t, the triggers are tripped and $1.2 trillion will automatically be trimmed by cutting things like the Pentagon budget, discretionary spending, Medicare and Medicaid.
Either way, this will not do much to fix the deficit. In fact, it’ll only keep the deficit from rising to $28 trillion in 10 years, according to GAO projections, but it’ll still grow to $26 trillion.
The sickening part is, with this “super committee,” who will bear the blame?
You have a dozen legislators whose constituents amount to less than 16 percent of the nation’s population making decisions that will have enormous impact on most of 300 million Americans.
As usual, the only people who will be protected in this fiasco are the super rich and corporations (Yes, corporations are people too; just ask Mitt Romney and the five corporatists on the Supreme Court).
If there was ever a time to vote every single one of these lawmakers out of office, it’s now.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune.)
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