Newt Gingrich has released a new ad with clips from the August 11th presidential debate in Iowa that has him saying, “I think this Super Committee is about as dumb an idea as Washington has come up with in my lifetime.” Here is the whole transcript of what Gingrich had to say about the Super Committee:
I used to run the House of Representatives, I have some general notion of these things. The idea that 523 senators and congressman are going to sit around for 4 months while 12 brilliant people — mostly picked for political reasons — are going to sit in some room and brilliantly come up with $1 trillion, 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 ‘Alright, we can shoot you in the head or cut off your right leg, which do you prefer?’
What they oughta 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.