Forget Congress. Cain’s “plan” is to have the current deficit reduction “supercommittee” to “pass the Phase 1 Enhanced Plan along with their spending cut package”
One can hope he understands that the “supercommittee” doesn’t “pass” anything, it just makes a recommendation.
But who knows, because he already seems to be under the misguided notion that they are going to pass a spending cut package, AND that while doing that legislatively obligated duty, they would be happy to throw in some extraneous new tax proposal that nobody has vetted, and that hasn’t been through the legislative process.
Which means maybe he doesn’t know that whatever the supercommittee puts out, congress has to, by law, simply vote yes or no, without amendments.
Or since Cain is used to having dictatorial powers, maybe he thinks it would be good to make a fundamental change to our tax code without ANY oversite, congressional committee work or hearings, or debate on the details in congress.
Because that is what he has proposed — that a supercommittee take on a non-legislatively-authorized task that does NOTHING to meet their goal (deficit reduction: Cain’s plan is revenue neutral under scoring), that would then obligate congress to pass his 9-9-9 plan without a single amendment or a minute of debate on the merits.
Of course, that would make his job easier. And it’s what a good corporate executive would do — just tell his subordinates what to do, and expect it to happen. But that’s not what we do in a representative democracy. We don’t have a king.
Remember how we mocked Obama when he said the supercommittee should be tasked by congress with finding another $500 billion to pay for his jobs bill? Well at least Obama saw the need for congress to actually AUTHORIZE the supercommittee to take on additional tasks.
I appreciate your report, but you make lots of hard-to-accept assumptions about Cain, and I wonder if you can direct me to Cain’s actual words on the subject, so I can weigh for myself.