Autopsy

Tea Party Killed the Supercommittee

The political media are filled with Monday-morning scolding at the partisan hardheadedness that doomed the debt supercommittee, but Salon's Steve Kornacki writes that the Tea Party decided the panel's fate long before it ever met. "Any Republican member of Congress who might be open to the idea of compromise would have to weigh it against the lesson that the Tea Party movement delivered loud and clear during the 2010 primary season: if we think you’ve sold us out, we’ll kick you out." Daily Intel's Jonathan Chait agrees that the committee was always a farce designed to distract the Tea Party. "The real goal of the supercommittee was to keep partisan deadlock from wreaking economic havoc."