Obama, Republicans clash on debt ‘supercommittee’

US: President Barack Obama and his Republican foes clashed Monday on whether a new congressional “supercommittee” could even look at raising taxes as it works to rein in runaway deficits by $1.2 trillion.

The confrontation stoked concerns that the panel, created in the hard-fought debt-limit deal Obama signed into law last week, is doomed to deadlock even before leaders of the polarized House and Senate name its 12 members.

Obama acknowledged “some skepticism” that the “the so-called ‘supercommittee’” will forge a compromise but hoped that America’s historic loss of its top-notch credit rating “will give us a renewed sense of urgency.”

“I assure you, we will stay on it until we get the job done,” Obama said at the White House with global markets tumbling in a sell-off triggered by Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the US credit rating from AAA to AA+.

Republican and Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate have until August 16 to name the committee’s members, but were expected to act as early as this week.

Their choices will decide whether the new panel deadlocks with potentially dire results or meets a late-November deadline for issuing recommendations that would then get streamlined consideration in both chambers by late December.

“It’s not a lack of plans or policies that is the problem here. It’s a lack of political will in Washington. It’s the insistence on drawing lines in the sand, a refusal to put what’s best for the country ahead of self-interest or party of ideology. And that’s what we need to change,” he said. Washington, Tuesday, AFP