Congress

Poll an average American resident on the success of the
supercommittee—the group of eight members of Congress who were tasked with
cutting the budget deficit by more than one trillion dollars—and it’s likely
they’ll offer the same answer all over: What’s that?

Head to the center of power in the United States, Washington
D.C., and that lack of interest and information is just as pronounced. “It’s
too confusing,” said Bonnie, a Southeast D.C. resident and
grocery store employee, shaking her head. She tried to explain why she hasn’t
heard of the supercommittee and finally said she simply never follows
Congress’s movements: “They say one thing and do another thing and it’s just
too confusing.”

Nearly three-and-a-half months after the bipartisan
commission–formally known as the United States Congress Joint Select Committee
on Deficit Reduction–formed, its mission was largely inscrutable to most
Americans. In the nation’s Capitol, which has long stood as an
illustration of how disconnected Congress can be from the people it’s working
for (or against), the gap is even more pronounced.

And now that the committee has failed to reach an agreement
on how to raise taxes or where to cut spending, Congress may have to pull a “trigger” on Americans next month—in which dramatic cuts in domestic and national security
spending will have to be made.

If you ask some observers–Nobel
Prize winning liberal economist Paul Krugman, Illinois Democrat Jesse Jackson,
Jr.–the failure of the supercommittee is blessing in disguise. “It shouldn’t have been attempted
in the first place,” Jackson said in a statement last night.  “Congress and the president should do their
jobs by making choices and using the regular processes for tax policy,
authorization and appropriation.”

But by the lights of others–workers’ rights organization, the National Employment Law Project–the lack of agreement creates a frightening moment.

NELP president Christine Owens points out, “Unless Congress acts
promptly, the economy will take another hit in the New Year as two million
unemployed workers will lose the modest federal benefits they rely on to get by
and that, in turn, support businesses in their communities.”

One of the many issues caught up
in the supercommittee’s deliberations included an extension of critical
unemployment insurance benefits, which will expire Dec. 31, barring
intervention.

The D.C. metro region overall has an unemployment rate of 11 percent. That’s bad enough, but in parts of Wards 7 and 8,
the poorest, blackest wards in the city, unemployment is close to 30 percent.
For black men, some estimates put real unemployment—a number that includes
able-bodied people who have dropped out of the workforce (often because they
are discouraged)—at around 50 percent.

As the Urban Institute’s Peter
Tatian put it, “You also have a lot of people who are
returning from incarceration or have other legal problems, and so those folks
find themselves at a disadvantage in hiring.”

On top of the dismal numbers of
unemployed, these wards also have large pockets of working-class and
middle-class black folks, many of whom fall into the category of the “working
poor.” That is, they’re one hard knock away from not being able to meet their financial
obligations. For many of these people, unemployment insurance is one thing that
stands between them and abject poverty if they lose their jobs.

Yet just cross the Anacostia
River from the Capitol complex, a mere three or four miles away, and questions about
the supercommittee’s work are met with befuddlement or blank stares. “I never
heard of that,” was a common refrain during a recent afternoon spent in the
Skyland neighborhood in Ward 8. And the shorthand explanation—that the
committee was created by the president to reduce the deficit—didn’t do much
to clear up the confusion.

One Southeast resident who gave
her name as Tisha just threw up her hands and laughed a little sheepishly,
saying of congressional wrangling over deals and votes, “I just wait to hear
what the results are.”

It’s hard to blame people—especially people whose
congressional representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, doesn’t have a vote—for
not caring, and it’s even more difficult to try to press the issue. The people
who care most about Congress’s doings are the people who are paid to do so:
Congressional staffers, members, and journalists. And the incredibly
complicated dealings of the supercommittee are even more inaccessible. “It puts
the people covering it to sleep,” says one Beltway reporter.

In part, that’s because so much
of what it does is on the theoretical side. It’s incredibly difficult to think
in trillions of dollars over a decade–$2.2 trillion, the amount that President Obama
agreed to reduce the deficit by in order to get Congress to raise the debt
ceiling this summer–is practically an unimaginably large number.

And the failsafe cuts that will
happen if Congress can’t come to an agreement will likely happen in bits and pieces that won’t be that noticeable.
At least, at first. While Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security will be
spared, whittling down the money for social services instead of raising revenue
will start to take its toll. 

That’s where theory becomes reality for many of those living paycheck to paycheck in Southeast D.C. There, it’s enough to understand the bigger picture of what’s unfolding on Capitol Hill. ”They don’t
seem to care about us,” summed up grocery store employee Bonnie, before going back to work.