Debt supercommittee members brace for failure

The congressional “supercommittee” stumbled its way toward failure Sunday, with final staff-level discussions focusing mostly on how the panel should publicly admit that lawmakers could not meet their mandate of shaving $1.2 trillion from the federal debt.

Rather than making a final effort at compromise, members of the special deficit-reduction committee spent their final hours casting blame and pointing fingers, bracing for the reaction from financial markets that are already jittery over the European debt crisis.

(Paul Kane live chatted with readers Monday about the reasons behind the supercommittee’s failure. Read the transcript. )

Half of the 12 lawmakers turned to the Sunday political news shows as their outlet, speaking of their effort in the past tense and accusing the other side of intransigence that they blamed for the failure to clinch a deal. There were no last-minute negotiations, no behind-closed-doors huddles, just a near-empty Capitol in which senior aides could not agree on how to formally shutter the panel by Monday night.

Almost every congressman has left Washington for the week-long Thanksgiving break, so the legislative reaction to the committee’s failure will not come until early next month. The impasse leaves a host of other must-pass items, such as extensions for unemployment insurance and the payroll tax holiday, without any vehicle for passage before year’s end.

Despite a national debt that topped $15 trillion last week, the two sides could not bridge the taxes-vs.-entitlement divide. The GOP’s passion for keeping tax rates as low as possible meant the panel’s Republicans demanded steep entitlement cuts for small-to-modest increases in tax revenue, and the Democrats fiercely guarded entitlement programs unless the Republicans gave in on higher taxes.

It was the same stumbling block that prevented President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) from reaching the “grand bargain” they negotiated over the summer, an effort to trim $4 trillion from future borrowing by the Treasury.

The Obama-Boehner negotiation ended with an agreement on more than $900 billion in spending cuts to federal agency budgets over the next decade while creating the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction — tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion more in savings and voting out a plan before Thanksgiving.

The panel of six Democrats and six Republicans, granted extraordinary fast-track powers, began convening in early September with a series of hearings and closed-door meetings. The group, however, has broken down in the past month into a series of small huddles, with a handful of lawmakers working to hit their minimum target of $1.2 trillion and others working on a smaller backup plan that would cushion the blow from the automatic spending cuts.