…to actually believe this nonsense about how the supercommittee was supposed to save us from fiscal apocalypse:
The concept of the supercommittee, as POLITICO’s Jake Sherman articulated in an email: “[I]f you put 12 serious members in a room, no distractions, easy way through the Senate [direct path for bill], they’d be able to get something.”
To quote a physicist friend of mine, that’s not even WRONG. Robert Heinlein, thou have lived in vain!
“A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. “
There was never any chance that the supercommittee was going to do anything. There were twelve of them. Twelve people cannot just disagree on what time it is; at that number the odds are good that you will have at least one member who has philosophical problems with the definition of time itself – and will be relentless in his or her determination to get that problem immortalized in the minutes at anything even remotely resembling an opportunity. If Congress had been serious about this, they would have limited this committee to one Republican, one Democrat, and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy*.
But they didn’t, because then they wouldn’t have been able to kick the can down the road. Congress likes to do that, you know; unfortunately, we’re running out of road. And that is why conservatives and libertarians both think that bigger government is not the answer to every single question. Because (to paraphrase somebody or other) the things that bigger government likes are not always the things that are good for it.
Sheesh.
Moe Lane
*This is one time where Kennedy’s penchant for determining Supreme Court cases based on what he’s had for breakfast that day would actually prove to be, you know, helpful. He’s the closest thing we have to an ambulatory random number generator.
“at that number the odds are good that you will have at least one member who has philosophical problems with the definition of time itself”
.
That one has to be Senator Kerry, it has to be!
There is also the old rule that a committee’s ability to make a decision is inversely proportional to it’s size i.e., the bigger it is the less likely they are to agree on anything.
Catseye: To determine the intelligence of a committee, divide the IQ of the stupidest one by the number of members.
When you’re starting with Lurch and dividing by twelve, you aren’t quite into paramecium territory.
Regards,
Ric
Actually, I’ve always observed that any committee with 12 members invariably fails to achieve a consensus on any issue, it’s like 12 is the magic number for a committee to fail.
.. once watched a group of serious IT guys trying to end a meeting while being thwarted by one guy who kept going on – for three hours – about his request to re-name the committee.
Give an ideologue a podium and they will not let it go …
Mew