The Far Left, “asymmerical incentives,” and the president’s reelection campaign are all to blame for the failure of the supercommittee, according to one member of the now-defunct panel.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), who authored the Republican members’ $1.2 trillion proposal that included up to $300 billion in increased revenues (which Democrats rejected), told a crowd at the Heritage Foundation that while Republicans focused on entitlement reform, Democrats refused to support any plan that didn’t include $1 trillion in new taxes. The Far Left holds that “productive people need to be punished with a big tax increase,” Toomey said, and that’s precisely what Congressional Democrats insisted on.

“They wanted that at the beginning, they wanted that at the middle, and they wanted that at the end,” he said. “Sometimes a little more than a trillion. But the gist of it was a massive tax increase with no changes whatsoever to the fundamental design of the programs that are driving the problem.”

Toomey blamed an “assymetry of incentives” for the supercommittee’s failure, saying that most Democrats view the automatic cuts triggered in the absence of a deal, which fall disproportionately on the defense budget, as much more acceptable than Republicans do. “There was certainly a segment of that caucus that finds the alternative to success perfectly acceptable,” he said.

He also suggested that the president’s reelection campaign will benefit from Congressional failure, which gave Democrats with another motive to resist compromise. “I think there were forces pulling the democrats away from agreement,” he said. “Let’s face it: We now have a presidential campaign that is now premised on the idea that the president is running against the do-nothing Congress, never mind that half of the Congress is controlled by Democrats. That is the fundamental message of his campaign. If the select committee had come to a great bipartisan agreement that could pass both houses and be signed into law, it would rather muddle the message that the president was trying to run on.”

While some of the Democratic committee members wanted to find a bipartisan solution, he said, they were ultimately reigned in the the liberal wing of their party.