◼ Speaking Thursday during the GOP presidential debate in Ames, Iowa, the former House speaker questioned the legitimacy of the 12-member panel that Democratic and Republican congressional leaders filled this week. - Politico
"I think this super committee is about as dumb an idea as Washington has come up with in my lifetime," Gingrich said. "I used to run the House of Representatives. I have some general notion of these things. The idea that 523 senators and congressmen are going to sit around for four months while 12 brilliant people, mostly picked for political reasons, are going to sit in some room and brilliantly come up with a trillion dollars, 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, 'All right, we can shoot you in the head or cut off your right leg, which do you prefer?'" he added. "What they ought to 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."
