Politically, the idea was to apply pressure by threatening the unthinkable, i.e., “We’ll shoot the hostage.” Either the supercommittee will cut a deal, or the defense budget gets whacked.

It is not going to happen that way.

First, the supercommittee is bound to fail; it will reach no meaningful budget agreement.

Second, when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur. That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen. While they are quite mistaken about the consequences, almost everyone on Capitol Hill (and in the Pentagon) thinks that those defense reductions will be “devastating,” “disastrous,” “doomsday” and any other apocalyptic term you can think of.

In short, the debt deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot.

In the 31 years I worked on Capitol Hill, I came to know several others with as much, or more, experience as I in understanding how the place operates. Not one of the four Hill veterans (with a collective 150 years of House-Senate experience) with whom I have spoken believes that the supercommittee is headed for anything but failure. The debt deal and the committee were designed only to kick the can down the road to get us past last summer’s crisis — with the inevitable result of provoking other crises.

The meetings held thus far by the supercommittee have made obvious its inevitable breakdown. At a hearing this week with the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf (who conducted himself with professionalism and grace), the congressional members demonstrated why the vast majority of Americans hold them in contempt.

Consisting mostly of second-stringers on budget issues and leadership errand boys (and girl) from their party caucuses, that bunch will find a $1.2 trillion budget solution sometime after pigs fly and shrimps whistle.

The real budget action on Capitol Hill is occurring behind closed doors. The defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee met on Tuesday, in private, to decide on the 2012 Department of Defense Appropriations Bill. It funds most, but not all, of the Pentagon’s budget. The subcommittee took cognizance of the initial mandatory cuts required by the debt deal, but not any parts that had to do with the supercommittee and the automatic cuts.

The Aug. 2 deal imposed — without any further palaver required — an initial phase of reductions on appropriations for the next 10 years totaling over $900 billion. While the precise budget obligation on the Pentagon in this first phase has not been entirely clear, most are now interpreting it to mean a $350 billion reduction. That means that the Pentagon budget would be effectively frozen at its current, fiscal year 2011 level — precisely the level set by the Appropriations Committee’s bill.

It safely can be predicted this will be the level of Pentagon spending the entire Congress endorses for 2012, after some theatrical grumbling by some Republicans about the bill’s spending being $26 billion less than President Obama’s now meaningless budget request from last February.

Even at the 2011 level, the bill is extremely generous. The amount — about $529 billion after separate military construction and some other pieces are added — will be almost as much “base” spending as the Pentagon has seen in any single year for decades.

If you add the separate funding for the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere ($118 billion), the amount is quite close to the Pentagon’s highest level since the end of World War II — and it is well above previous secondary peaks attained in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and Ronald Reagan’s fleeting zenith in 1985.

That “frozen” 2011 level will be more than twice the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Somalia. It will be more than $80 billion more than we spent, on average, during the Cold War when we faced a threatening and heavily armed Soviet Union and a hostile, dogmatically communist China. In the absence of these two huge threats, we are now being told we need to spend more.

While the new DOD appropriations bill was described by its architect, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, as “not an easy allocation to meet,” it is actually a defense budget quite flush with money.

The bill includes several gimmicks to permit higher spending than is apparent. There is the clumsy ploy of moving $6.5 billion out of the capped part of the Pentagon budget that the debt deal limited and adding the money back into the separate (uncapped) funding for the war in Afghanistan. (This, of course, permitted the “base” bill to contain $6.5 billion more than otherwise.)

Also, as the details trickle out next week, we will find the usual ruses, including cuts for “revised economic assumptions,” “unobligated balances” and other phony games to pretend the committee is reducing money (rather than deferring it) and making good government decisions (rather than taking capricious cuts in military readiness while protecting procurement — and contractors). (For more on these tricks, see here.)

The current defense bill is not a tough-minded but moderate action to impose restraint on the Pentagon; it is an effort to protect Pentagon spending as much as possible. With Robert Gates taking the lead and Leon Panetta bobble-heading in agreement, the Pentagon has resolved itself to that first phase of $350 billion in cuts over 10 years. They are not happy about it, but they will live with it in order to fend off further reductions. The Senate Appropriations Committee leadership is in deep sympathy with that sentiment.

Filled with bunkum to make it seem as if it’s cutting at least moderately but is actually rescuing the unaffordable, underperforming F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the bill from the Senate Appropriations Committee is a rear-guard budget protection action.

The gambit will be successful. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., is quoted almost every day about the cataclysm that will occur if the defense budget is cut at all. This kind of hysteria makes the assertions of Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., almost seem to be the middle ground: He threatened to quit the supercommittee if the Pentagon cuts go beyond the initial $350 billion. The response from Democrats and even Republicans who have previously favored meaningful Pentagon cuts has sealed the deal: They have been completely silent.

All that remains to be done is to let the supercommittee proceed on its clear path to failure. That will trigger the dreaded automatic cuts, but only nominally. As designed, those cuts would not occur until 2013. The big defense spender types will have all of 2012 to trash any opponents who dare to speak in favor of allowing them. They will use their traditional slander that to be against bloat in the defense budget is to be “anti-defense.” It has always worked in the past, especially with Democrats who want to posture themselves as moderate, such as candidate Obama.

The debt deal will be rewritten. The defense budget will be “saved,” and the next budget crisis will be made both inevitable and worse. We have a lot more dysfunction in Congress and the White House yet to observe.

Winslow T. Wheeler worked on Capitol Hill for 31 years; he handled national security issues for both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the Government Accountability Office. He is the editor of the new anthology “The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It,” available online here. 

If the consensus reporting from Capitol Hill is correct, sometime in the next two days, Republicans and Democrats will agree on a deal that keeps the payroll tax cut in place, extends unemployment benefits (albeit with a gradual reduction in the length of benefits put into place) and, once again, protects doctors from a cut in their Medicare reimbursement rate. The unemployment benefits and the so-called doc fix will purportedly be paid for by a combination of wireless spectrum sales, tweaks to how much the federal government contributes to federal worker pensions, and cash carved out of the health reform deal.

The politics of this are a lot easier to figure out than the economics. Simply put: It’s a win for Obama. The White House avoids putting the brakes on economic growth by preventing an imminent tax hike and keeping the safety net more or less intact for unemployed workers. In the run-up to an election that may be largely decided by the performance of the economy over the summer, that’s huge. If Republicans, as some have suggested, wanted to tank the economy to ensure new occupants in the White House, this is not the way to go about it.

And as a bonus, at least for the moment, the White House has also managed to avoid another game of budget showdown chicken. That said, the House has yet to vote, and over the past two years we’ve  witnessed several occasions in which recalcitrant conservative representatives have torpedoed deals that were supposedly set in place. On the other hand, it’s possible that the negative political consequences of the 10 percent approval rating currently “enjoyed” by House Republicans is beginning to sink in.

Economically, the deal doesn’t do anything to additionally stimulate the economy, it merely keeps in place measures that have already been enacted. The maximum length of eligibility for unemployment benefits will gradually contract, a process that will cause hardship for workers who drop through the safety net. But macroeconomically speaking, the effect isn’t going to be that huge. Nor will the offsets that pay for the unemployment extensions and the doc fix add up to much in the way of contractionary austerity, though it certainly won’t be pleasant for federal workers who may end having to contribute more to their own pensions.

All in all, it’s kind of a wash. The White House avoids sabotaging the economy, the Republicans avoid making themselves any more unpopular than they already are. It’s a sign of just how dysfunctional Washington has been over the last couple of years that the absence of drama seems like a masterful political stroke by Obama. Maybe, as James Fallows suggests, he really is learning how to be president.

Public polling seems to indicate that the voters generally favor taxing millionaires more than they do the Republican policy riders. That would seemingly put President Obama and Congressional Democrats in a strong position. And on the surface, so far, it would appear that Obama has been playing his hand well — tightening his rhetoric on inequality, threatening to veto any bill that attempts to jam through the Keystone pipeline as part of a deal. But his actual position is weaker than it seems. The truth is that neither Republicans nor Democrats have the votes to pass their own dream legislation, so a compromise is inevitable. And that compromise, by definition, will include things that Democrats don’t like. Republicans won’t get all of their policy riders, but they’ll get something.

Obama has no real choice, because standing pat is not an option. Politically, Obama might gain by making the entirely reasonable argument that dogmatic obstruction by Republicans pursuing ideological goals doesn’t serve the country’s pressing needs. But if the payroll tax cut expires and longterm unemployment benefits aren’t extended, millions of Americans who are already struggling will take another hit. And that simply isn’t acceptable.

How exactly we will get to the endgame is impossible for anyone who is not privy to the negotiations that are undoubtedly going on between Congressional leaders right now to say. But the general outline, after a year of government shutdown and debt ceiling fights, is all too familiar. Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, and John Boehner will continue to say mean things about each other. A series of futile votes will be held, supposedly to demonstrate what each side already knows — that neither party has the power to ram through its agenda. Tension will build — but the postponing of a vote on the “omnibus” spending bill necessary to keep the government operating past Friday adds the necessary deadline frisson to force some kind of resolution.

There will be a deal before Christmas. But how will we decide who “wins” at the end? Easy — just keep a close eye on how the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefit extensions are paid for. Most of the GOP policy riders will fall by the wayside; the true battle is whether the extensions get paid for at all, or whether funding comes from carve-outs out of Obama’s agenda. If there’s any kind of tax increase at all on the wealthy, that would be a win for Democrats, but don’t hold your breath. Because even if politically, Obama has a strong hand, pragmatically he doesn’t. There are more than enough Republicans willing to let the interests of working and middle class Americans take a hit if it means holding the line against higher taxes on the richest Americans. And if economic growth slows in 2012 as a result, that’s a bonus for the GOP, because the incumbent party gets the ultimate responsibility for that quagmire.

The advice from here? Turn off CSPAN and go do your Christmas shopping. This reality show needs to be cancelled.

The most obvious proof that investors aren’t really alarmed by the prospect that partisan political gridlock will continue as least until the end of 2012 comes from the bond market. U.S. Treasury yields fell again, probably because investors who are continuing to be spooked by Europe’s sovereign debt woes are looking once again for the safest place to put their money. Despite all its faults, the U.S. economy is still growing faster than Europe’s, and the prospect that we will default on our debts still seems to be much lower than the chances that Europe won’t fix its own mess.

But that’s not to say that there won’t be economic fallout from this not-so-epic fail. If no action is taken by the end of the year, both payroll tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits will expire for millions of beleaguered Americans. That’s the definition of anti-stimulus, hitting American consumers directly in the pocketbook. Tuesday’s unexpected downward revision of the third quarter GDP growth estimate from 2.5 to 2.0 percent — a definite wet blanket stifling the more optimistic perceptions of the economy that had been percolating in recent months — emphasizes the risk. According to various estimates, the expiration of the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits will together cut another 1 percent or so off of GDP growth. That will put the U.S. economy back perilously near  a full standstill.

If it seems strange to be bemoaning a debt-reduction committee’s failure to extend a payroll tax cut and a social safety net benefit, both of which would obviously increase the deficit, well then, consider this: The biggest roadblock to getting a deal cut was Republican insistence on keeping all the Bush tax cuts in place. Indeed, the final GOP proposal actually pushed for lowering the maximum tax rate on the wealthy even further. But the long-term negative deficit reduction implications of keeping the Bush tax cuts in place for the wealthy dwarf the budgetary impact of the short-term measures that would help middle- and working-class Americans.

Tax cuts for the wealthy don’t give you as much stimulus bang-for-your buck (the rich are more likely to save their windfalls rather than spend them). So what this means is that the real impact of the supercommittee’s failure is that instead of providing short-term help to people who most need it, which would spur economic growth, Republicans have stood by their determination to keep tax cuts in place that will do the most long-term budget damage, while benefiting the people who least need it.

There’s no reason to be surprised by this outcome. But we can still get hopping mad about it, if we want to.

Then, Senate Republicans refused to let the chamber vote on a compromise offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that was similar to the House version but lacked the loan program cuts. A vote on Reid’s measure was set for Monday afternoon, but Republicans seemed likely to prevail because Democrats would need 60 votes to win — exceeding the 53 votes they have.

The basic dispute pitted GOP objections that the bill’s emergency spending was too costly against Democratic complaints that cutting the energy loan programs would stifle the economy and cost jobs.

The fresh round of brinksmanship came with lawmakers facing two deadlines. Obama administration officials have warned that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s fund for disaster victims could run out of money early next week, even as claims from Hurricane Irene and other recent disasters continue to arrive at government offices. And Congress has completed none of the 12 annual spending bills for the federal fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, meaning agencies would have to close their doors without fresh funding.

“The government’s not shutting down. I spoke to Mr. Fugate myself,” Reid said, referring to FEMA director Craig Fugate. “FEMA is not running out of money. We’ll come here Monday, reasonable heads will prevail.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Democrats were ignoring the government’s budget problems.

“What’s at stake is whether we’re going to add to the debt or not,” McConnell said.

The measure the House passed early Friday would temporarily prevent a federal shutdown by financing government agencies from the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year through Nov. 18. It was approved by a near party-line 219-203 vote.

The Senate version, approved last week with the support of 10 GOP senators, provided $6.9 billion in disaster aid and no cuts to help pay for it.

White House spokesman Jay Carney faulted House Republicans for the deadlock on Friday, saying they had passed legislation knowing it would die in the Senate, just as they had during last month’s fight over extending the federal debt limit.

“The fever hasn’t broken — the behavior that we saw this summer that really repelled Americans continues,” Carney said.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, blamed Democrats, saying the House-passed bill had enough money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the short term and that Congress could provide more money later.

“The Senate Democratic leadership is essentially threatening to delay FEMA money that families need right now for a partisan gain,” said the spokesman, Michael Steel.

It was unclear how the standoff would be resolved. The House and Senate had both planned to take next week off, but neither seemed likely to risk accusations of ignoring the thousands of Americans victimized by natural calamities or of allowing the government to shut its doors.

“We’re establishing priorities,” said Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif. “We have a priority, that being dealing with our fellow Americans.”

House passage represented a reversal from an embarrassing setback the chamber dealt its Republican leaders on Wednesday. On that day, the House rejected a nearly identical measure, shot down by Democrats complaining its disaster aid was too stingy and conservative Republicans upset that its overall spending was too extravagant.

The bill the House approved Friday morning contained just one change — an additional $100 million in savings from cutting a second Energy Department loan program, this one aimed at sparking new energy technologies.

That is the same program that financed a $528 million federal loan to Solyndra Inc., the California solar panel maker that won praise from President Barack Obama but has since gone bankrupt and laid off its 1,100 workers. The Obama administration had praised Solyndra as a model for green energy companies, but now Congress is investigating the circumstances under which the government approved the loan.

The gridlock over the spending bill was the third time this year the two parties have clashed over legislation whose passage both sides considered crucial.

In April with just hours to spare, the two sides reached agreement on a bill that averted a federal shutdown and provided money for government agencies through September. Then this summer, they battled for weeks before finally approving legislation extending the government’s borrowing authority and narrowly preventing a historic federal default.

Against a backdrop of the 2012 presidential and congressional elections and angst over the country’s dismal job market, this year’s clashes have been intensified by the infusion of dozens of tea party Republicans who often show little inclination to compromise.

Wednesday’s defeat of the spending bill was only the most recent time they have made life difficult for Boehner. And it underscored the challenges ahead this fall as Congress tackles efforts to fix the economy, create jobs and try to control the $14 trillion national debt.

Even before the House vote, however, the leader of the Senate promised that majority Democrats will scuttle the measure as soon as it reaches the chamber on Friday. Democrats there want a much larger infusion of disaster aid and they’re angry over cuts totaling $1.6 trillion from clean energy programs — and the strong-arm tactics being tried by the House.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the House plan “is not an honest effort at compromise. … It will be rejected by the Senate.”

The combination of events promises to push the partisan war into the weekend and could increase the chances that the government’s main disaster aid account at the Federal Emergency Management Agency might run dry early next week.

More broadly, the renewed partisanship over what should be routine moves to help disaster victims and prevent a government shutdown sends a discouraging sign as a bitterly divided Washington looks ahead to more significant debates on President Barack Obama’s jobs plan and efforts by a congressional supercommittee to slash deficits.

Thursday’s maneuvering started as Republicans controlling the House moved to resurrect the disaster aid package after an embarrassing loss on Wednesday.

Instead of reaching out to Democrats, House GOP leaders looked to persuade wayward tea party Republicans to change their votes and help approve the assistance — and try to force Senate Democrats into a corner with little choice but to accept cuts to clean energy programs they favor. One sweetener for conservatives was to add $100 million in savings from a program that financed a federal loan to the now-bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra Inc.

Republicans had hoped that once the House passed the measure, Senate Democrats would have had little choice but to accept it, especially with lawmakers eager to escape Washington for a weeklong recess. The move instead infuriated Democrats, who felt GOP leaders were trying to “jam” them into accepting the GOP bill.

“We’re fed up with this,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic Whip. “They know what it takes for us to extend (stopgap funding) and keep the government in business. And this brinksmanship … we’re sick of it.”

Unless Congress acts by midnight next Friday, much of the government will shut down. More immediate is the threat that the government’s main disaster aid account will run out of money early next week.

“The Senate should pass this bill immediately, and the president should sign it, because any political games will delay FEMA money that suffering American families desperately need,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

The battling came as the stock market absorbed heavy losses and pessimism about the economy deepened. The arguing was reminiscent of the poisonous atmosphere of this summer rather than lawmakers’ more recent promises to work together to find common ground where possible.

Wednesday’s embarrassing 230-195 defeat of the disaster aid bill in the GOP-majority House exposed divisions within the Republican Party that demonstrated the tenuous grip that Boehner has on the chamber. Forty-eight Republicans opposed the measure then, chiefly because it would permit spending at the rate approved in last month’s debt pact between Boehner and Obama, a level that is unpopular with tea party lawmakers.

GOP leaders maneuvered to win a vote on the largely identical measure by arguing to their party members that the alternative was to give Democrats a better deal by adding more disaster aid or decoupling it from $1.5 billion in spending cuts.

“What we voted on yesterday was the best deal Republicans could get and it can only go downhill from here,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. “So we should try to re-vote again on the same bill we had yesterday, vote on it again, pass it this time, or if not we’ll have to make concessions that would help the Democrats.”

GOP leaders cut those defections in half, to 24, on Friday morning’s tally. Six Democrats from disaster-hit districts voted for the measure.

The vast majority of Democrats opposed the legislation over $1.5 billion in accompanying spending cuts from an Energy Department loan program for help in producing fuel-efficient vehicles.

To those cuts, House leaders added another $100 million in savings from a loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects approved under the 2009 stimulus law. Congress set aside $2.4 billion in case some of the loans went bad, such as a $500 million-plus loan to now-bankrupt Solyndra Inc., a California-based solar panel maker effusively praised by Obama.

Time is running short for disaster victims.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Thursday that the government’s main disaster aid account is “running on fumes” and could be tapped out as early as early next week. She called on Congress to quickly resolve the problem or risk delays in getting disaster projects approved.

“We have stretched this as far as it can go,” Napolitano told The Associated Press as she flew to Joplin, Mo., to view tornado damage. “We are scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

As of Thursday morning, there was just $212 million in the FEMA’s disaster relief fund. The House measure contains $3.7 billion in disaster aid, mostly for the FEMA fund. A rival Senate measure muscled through that chamber last week by Reid — with the help of 10 Republicans — would provide $6.9 billion.

The drama and battling over disaster aid and stopgap spending is unusual. Such measures usually pass routinely since the alternative is shutting down much of the government and denying help to victims of floods, hurricanes and other disasters.

What is more, the House GOP plan won bipartisan support in June when it passed as part of a broader homeland security spending bill. And the $3.7 billion in House aid would provide sufficient help while lawmakers work out a broader spending bill for the 2012 budget year beginning Oct. 1.

Senate Democrats are instead insisting on fully funding most disaster aid programs as part of the stopgap measure, an unusual move.

The current imbroglio illustrates the difficulty lawmakers are sure to have when trying to address tougher problems. The toughest task confronts the so-called supercommittee, which is supposed to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings over the coming decade to implement the August budget and debt pact.

The panel had its third public meeting Thursday, again exposing differences between Republicans and Democrats on taxes. The panel has until Thanksgiving to produce legislation — and there’s no sign yet of much progress toward agreement.

Before Thursday night’s eruption, the Senate had had an unusually productive week. For example, it voted Thursday to help American workers who fall victim to foreign competition. The move to renew expired portions of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provides retraining and financial support for workers adversely affected by trade, sets the stage for Obama to submit trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.