The failure this week of the so-called congressional supercommittee to agree on a package to reduce the federal budget deficit comes down not only to Republican intransigence, but really to that of just one conservative in particular, a man referred to as the “13th member” of the committee.

Specifically, many on both sides — including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a prominent member of the supercommittee — called out Grover Norquist, the extremely powerful anti-tax activist in Washington, for his role in keeping Republicans from agreeing to any new taxes.

Norquist wields much of his power due to the anti-tax pledge signed by most Republicans in Congress, and his ability to enforce that oath by working to defeat any who renege.  All six of the GOP members of the supercommittee had signed on to the Norquist pledge.

Perhaps this doomed the supercommittee from the start, given that Norquist had blessed the Republican supercommittee members this summer.

The supercommittee was supposed to recommend more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years to be considered by Congress on a fast-track basis. The panel, known formally as the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, bogged down mostly on partisan lines, however.

Indeed, after the co-chairs of the bipartisan supercommittee announced that the panel would not be agreeing to a deal, the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined, “Thank You, Grover Norquist.”

“Democrats on the Committee made clear everything was on the table. Our offers were balanced. We walked the line of shared sacrifice, however difficult, and we proposed painful choices for programs we care about deeply,” says Kerry, who reportedly tried until the very end to get the supercomittee to forge a compromise. “However, we simply could not overcome the Republican insistence on making tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans permanent. We would not give another $550 billion tax cut to the wealthiest. Shifting the tax burden to the middle class was not the way to reduce the deficit. This was simply doctrine for some of our Republican colleagues, even as many worked very hard in good faith to find a better way forward.

“I believe it would have been unconscionable to ask middle class Americans to finance more tax cuts for the wealthy while seniors on fixed incomes paid the price,” Kerry adds. “People need to remember: The Committee was created to cut the deficit not to cut taxes for the wealthiest, the exact tax policies that didn’t create jobs and gave us deficits in the first place. The bottom line is that no Super Committee can succeed with Grover Norquist as its 13th member.”

YOU CAN WATCH A VIDEO PRODUCED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS ABOUT NORQUIST’S INFLUENCE HERE:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

The "Declaration of the Occupation" originally was published in the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

Three weeks into the Occupy protests that began on Wall Street and have now spread to every corner of the nation, bemused and befuddled commentators and lawmakers in Washington still insist on claiming that the demonstrations lack a clear objective or set of demands. But that’s not really true.

While the protesters are not marching in support or opposition to this or that specific legislation or individual policy, the brave and spirited folks animating this new movement certainly do have a clear goal. Their agenda is admittedly broad, but that simply speaks to just how wide and deep corporate influence has become in our country.

The long list of grievances is reflective of just how widespread the tendency of big business and the super-wealthy is to “place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality.” Those aren’t my words. They come directly from the protesters themselves, from their own published “Declaration of the Occupation,” approved entirely by consensus back on September 29.

As with any strong declaration, the protesters begin with a powerful preamble:

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individualsto protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.

The protesters go on to enumerate a pretty complete list of what’s wrong with our country today, from the illegal foreclosure process which has led to too many Americans losing their homes, to the poisoning of our food supply through negligence, and undermining the farming system through monopolization, and of course the bankers who happily took our tax dollars for bailouts only to turn around and resume paying themselves exorbitant bonuses at our expense.