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The folks over at OpenCongress.org lay out quite clearly how this so-called "Super Committee" of 6 Senators and 6 Congressmen is completely undemocratic:

The supercommittee on deficit reduction that Congress created in the debt ceiling bill is an absurdly anti-democratic institution. The vast majority of Americans do not have a representative serving on it, yet it’s responsible for making enormous decisions about the allocation of public resources that will profoundly effect every American for decades to come. Furthermore, Congress gave it special powers that no other member or committee in Congress enjoys. Their proposal will be guaranteed a vote in both chambers of Congress, no amendments, points of order, or motions to reconsider will be allowed, and it will not be susceptible to filibusters in the Senate. That’s right, the Senate couldn’t reform filibuster rules at the beginning of the session because doing so would violate minority rights, but they still managed to change them for the supercommittee.

Most importantly, each member has been picked because they will never be held accountable:

All 6 House members are long-term incumbents with virtual locks on their districts. Not a single one of them is from one of the 114 districts that are considered “competitive” in 2012 by the Cook Political Report. I had a math-genius friend run the numbers for me and he determined that the probability that all six members of the supercommittee come from noncompetitive districts, if selected randomly (i.e.without regard to re-election prospects) is about 15%.

On average, the House members of the supercommittee won re-election in 2010 with 70% of the vote. They beat their challengers, on average, by 42% of the vote. Those are very strong numbers, especially considering the anti-incumbency sentiment that defined the 2010 elections.

On the Senate side, only one of the supercommittee members is up for re-election in 2012, Sen. Jon Kyl [R, AZ], and he’s from a state considered to go “likely Republican” by Cook. Half of them won’t have to face voters agains until 2016 and the other two get to wait until 2014. By then, some other issues and votes will be front and center and the supercommittee will seem like ancient history. If the supercommittee senators were chosen without regard for when they have to campaign for re-election again, the probability that only one of the six would be up in 2012 is about 11%.

Finally, OpenCongress says:

As for the rest of the members of Congress who aren’t on the supercommittee, the debt bill set things up so they really don’t have to own their vote. It includes an automatic trigger of draconian cuts to Medicare and national security spending that would take effect if the supercommittee plan does not pass Congress. So everyone will be stuck between a rock and a hard place by design, which means they all get to tell their constituents that they were forced to vote for the lesser of two evils. The real vote, of course, was on the debt bill that set up this whole process (Senate/House).

It's a gargantuan abdication of responsibility and our Democracy is worse off for it.

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