Room 200, where US 'super committee' seeks answers to financial turmoil
Posted by has in other stuff, room 200, world on Monday, November 7, 2011
Room 200, a 30-by-30 foot room inside the United States Capitol, is the home of the U.S. Congress's "super committee," a group of lawmakers who are tasked to find a deal to cut the huge budget deficits in the U.S.
Check out the Reuters report about Room 200 below:
Washington, D.C. - Deep beneath the Capitol is a red-carpeted room that recently reverberated to the sound of Democrats and Republicans singing together, and then to their angry exchanges over how to fix the U.S. budget.Welcome to Congress's "super committee" room.
This is where a dozen lawmakers lock themselves away to try to strike a deal that, if reached, could prove a turning point in one of the United States' biggest challenges: shrinking its huge budget deficits and containing its soaring debt burden.
On a dozen occasions so far since early September, the committee's six senators and six members of the House of Representatives pulled up a dozen yellow chairs to four wooden tables pushed into a square and commenced haggling over spending and taxes.
There is no assigned seating in the bare 30-by-30 foot Room 200 in the Capitol's visitors' center, two floors underground.
Instead the six Republicans and six Democrats routinely change places as they try new ways to find a deal by November 23 to cut the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years.
The swings between comity and acrimony do not yet signal whether a deal can be done by the deadline.
Failure could stoke fears among investors around the world that the U.S. political system is incapable of coming to grips with the country's huge debt.
All of this is happening at a time when Congress's approval rating among Americans has sunk to an all-time low of less than 10 percent, largely because of partisan gridlock.
"At this point, the most serious adult conversations going in Congress are at the super committee," a senior aide said.
"Members are driven by a sense that this is a very precarious time in U.S. history that beckons a solution," the aide said. "But at the same time, members wrestle with political loyalties that they can't divorce themselves from."
Democrats are pushing to cut the deficit by up to $3 trillion over 10 years, much higher than the super committee's target, with a mix of spending cuts and new tax revenues. But Republicans deeply oppose raising taxes, warning of job losses and damage to an already fragile economic recovery.
Across the divide, friendships have blossomed in Room 200. Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Senator Rob Portman have started biking together in the morning.
Kerry has emerged as a leader of an informal, bipartisan group of six lawmakers within the super committee, the biggest of a number of sub-groups seeking to narrow differences.
He recently invited a few of his group of six, including Portman, to his home for dinner, congressional aides say.
Senator Patty Murray, the panel's Democratic co-chair, and Jeb Hensarling, the committee's Republican co-chair, have a solid working relationship, according to aides who asked not to be identified because of the panel's secrecy policy.
Read more of the report HERE.