Newt on super committee in August: "A dumb idea"

Barring a last-minute miracle, the congressional super committee seems headed to failure in its quest to work out a deal on reducing our monstrous deficit.

But in August, during a presidential debate, Newt Gingrich spotted failure in the future.

I think this super committee is about as dumb an idea as Washington has come up with in my lifetime.

I used to run the House of Representatives, I have some general notion of these things. The idea that 523 senators and congressman are going to sit around for 4 months while 12 brilliant people -- mostly picked for political reasons -- are going to sit in some room and brilliantly come up with $1 trillion, or force us to choose between gutting our military and accepting a tax increase is irrational.

They're going to walk in just before Thanksgiving and say "Alright, we can shoot you in the head or cut off your right leg, which do you prefer?"

What they oughta do is scrap the committee right now, recognize it's a dumb idea, go back to regular legislative business, assign every subcommittee the task of finding savings, do it out in the open through regular legislative order, and get rid of this secret phony business.

Last week the Washington Post, which is not usually kind to conservatives, had this to say about the former House Speaker: "Gingrich, more than any other candidate in the 2012 presidential race, has been talking about the super committee on the campaign trail and at debates." Later in the article the Post called the controversy surrounding the star-crossed committee "an ideal set of circumstances for Gingrich, who has demonstrated a skilled grasp of policy minutiae in speeches and during debates, where he has excelled."

Technorati tags: newt gingrich republicans elections 2012 government politics news