Watch Football, President Obama, and the Super Committee Today

Tonight, millions of excited fans will tune in for the kick-off game of the NFL season, Saints vs. Packers. I hope they will be as eager to listen to President Obama’s much-anticipated jobs speech before a joint session of Congress at 7:00 p.m. EST today. With August unemployment data showing zero job growth and stagnant unemployment, we need urgent action. Congress cannot address our nation’s deficits without putting people back to work.
But today is important for another reason, because the members tasked with finding $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in additional budget savings over the next 10 years — the so-called Super Committee — are meeting for the first time. Their work is not so public, however.

Today in The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel featured a series of fact sheets released by the anti-poverty campaign Half in Ten (of which The Leadership Conference is a partner) to answer the question, “Whose interests will the super committee members represent?”

Before embarking on a GOP “cuts only” approach that too many Democrats seem willing to buy into, the super committee members—six from the House and six from the Senate, evenly divided between the parties—should look homeward to their own districts and states and see how their constituents are doing. That should serve as a reminder of just whom it is they were elected to serve—it’s not K Street and the nearly 100 registered lobbyists who used to work for super committee members and now expect to be “heavily involved” in this debate, according to the Washington Post. It’s their constituents back home.

That’s why Half in Ten—a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next 10 years—along with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, have put together a comprehensive fact sheet for each of the twelve members, describing the conditions in their districts and states—from the jobs picture, to the impact of tax policy, to poverty and education.