The 12 members of the deficit-cutting Super Congress might be the most popular people in Washington. As they deliberate how to identify more than $1 trillion in spending cuts, special interests are determined to protect their pet programs — and one way to do so is with campaign contributions.

The committee held a rare public meeting Wednesday, and the debate centered on potential savings from the Defense Department budget, given President Obama’s decision to withdraw all troops from Iraq by year’s end. Any cuts to defense spending won’t sit well with defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Honeywell, who — among others — have been trying to bullet-proof themselves with campaign contributions.

In just six weeks after the committee members were named, political action committees for almost 100 special interests ponied up more than $300,000 in contributions to the lawmakers. The donations will continue to pour in until the committee has finished its work shortly before Thanksgiving.

Formed as part of a compromise in late July between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the committee must come up with $1.5 trillion or more in budget savings, enough to match increases in the government's ability to borrow enough money to pay its bills through the beginning of 2013. The whole Congress is required to take an up-or-down vote on the committee’s recommendations by Dec. 23.

Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina has long been the third-ranking Democrat in the House and a reliably liberal loyalist who will largely hold the line on the party’s sacred cows of Social Security and popular federal health programs.

In a recent interview with The State, a South Carolina newspaper, Clyburn said he would be open to a Super Committee plan that cut federal payments to doctors and hospitals, but not beneficiaries. He also called for ending the Bush-era tax cuts and eliminating corporate tax loopholes.

When the Democrats lost their majority position in the last election, House Democrats created a new leadership position for Clyburn – assistant Democratic leader. The role gave him a place during the debt ceiling talks and Clyburn said he frequently talked with President Obama. He also served on Vice President Joseph Biden’s debt reduction working group.

His rhetoric sharpened as the debt ceiling negotiations continued. Clyburn said the Republican plan, shepherded by House Speaker John Boehner, was less than serious. He is now in the position of being an active participant in that plan’s key ingredient for future fiscal reform – the Super Committee.

“Speaker Boehner does not even pretend that this is a serious attempt to solve the problem—he sold this bill to his Conference by telling them that it wasn’t bipartisan.  And with divided government, a plan that isn’t bipartisan is no plan at all, it’s just a game,” he said.

Elected to the House in 1992, Clyburn began his career as a civil rights activist, organizing sit-ins in the 1960s. He has been an active leader in the Congressional Black Caucus and has frequently tried to encourage leadership to take on issues pressing for African Americans.

Chris Van Hollen is the liberal counterpoint to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, whose fiscal blueprint calls for broad whacks at entitlement programs.

Van Hollen, as the ranking Democrat on the budget committee, says Republicans would “increase tax breaks for millionaires and special interests and pays for these new tax cuts on the backs of working Americans” while Democrats would keep “our commitments to America’s seniors and most vulnerable instead of dismantling Medicare and Medicaid.”

And, for good measure, the Republican plan “amounts to a yellow-brick road for the already prosperous and a dead end for the rest of the country,” he says.

Van Hollen might have been in line to be the budget chairman rather than Ryan, but that opportunity slipped away after House Democrats suffered devastating losses in November 2010—while Van Hollen chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Defeated Chairman John Spratt endorsed Van Hollen to succeed him.  

The Maryland congressman, whose district includes much of the affluent Washington, D.C., suburb of Montgomery County, was elected to Congress in 2002. He served a dozen years in the Maryland legislature before that.

He had a notably restrained reaction to the Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating.

"The most important thing we can do to restore confidence and improve the fiscal situation is to get the economy moving and put people back to work. That immediate focus should be coupled with a long term plan to reduce the deficit,” he said.

Now in his ninth term, Rep. Xavier Becerra is confident enough to have cast a couple of high-profile “no” votes lately.

The most recent was on Aug. 1 when the California Democrat refused to support the bill that raised the debt ceiling, saying it failed to address “the main drivers of our deficits: the Bush tax cuts, and the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it does nothing to fix the biggest deficit holding our economy back: the jobs deficit.”

He was also a member of the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission, created by President Obama in 2010. Becerra voted against the commission’s recommendations, firmly from the left.

A major question for the Super Congress is the degree to which Democrats will yield on entitlement cuts. Becerra serves as the ranking member on the Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee. After his no vote on the debt ceiling bill, he announced, “We owe it to those who built this country to protect Medicare and Social Security from being blindsided by future indiscriminate cuts.”

He is much younger than other Ways and Means committee members with more seniority, positioning him for potential chairmanship in the future. Apart from his powerful committee and commission appointments, he serves in the House leadership as vice chair of the Democratic Caucus.

Becerra’s California district includes the heart of Los Angeles and Dodger Stadium. According to the 2010 Almanac of American Politics, the 2000 census ranked Becerra’s district “first in the nation with its noncitizens (41 percent) and last in the nation in homes where English is spoken (21 percent). In 2007, 52 percent of its residents were foreign-born.” In 2008, 80 percent of his district voted for Obama.

Before returning to public service, Sen. Patrick Toomey spent four years as the president of the ultra-conservative Club for Growth, giving him serious pro-business, anti-tax credentials that will make him a formidable force on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

Toomey grew up in a working class family in East Providence, R.I., the third of six children. In the early 1990s, he moved to Allentown, Pa., where he started a restaurant chain called Rookie’s with his two brothers.

In 1998, Toomey won the open seat in Pennsylvania's 15th Congressional District. During his House career, Toomey positioned himself as an expert in budget and banking matters. His commitment to limited government and pro-economic growth policies earned him plaudits from Citizens Against Government Waste, Americans for Tax Reform and the National Taxpayers Union. Toomey voluntarily retired in 2004 after three terms in the House, where he racked up one of the most conservative voting records.

In 2005, Toomey took the helm of the Club for Growth. The group condemned the federal government interventions after the 2008 market crash, including the $700 billion bank bailout. “Instead of launching the largest government bailout since the Great Depression,” said Toomey, “the government should be implementing policies to stimulate the economy. These include, at a minimum, cutting the tax on capital gains [and] cutting corporate taxes.”

During his time at its head, the Club was known for running conservative challengers to moderate Republicans in Congress in an attempt to force them to move right — or be replaced.

With experience in the both chambers of Congress and the White House, Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio is better placed than most to make and market a deficit deal.

As popular with his constituents as his fellow members of Congress, Portman was first elected to the House in a 1993 special election with over 70 percent of the vote. He would repeat that feat in six consecutive elections until he left Congress in 2005 to join the cabinet of President George W. Bush as U.S. trade representative. A year later, he took over the Office of Management and Budget. When Portman stepped down in 2007, then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, told the Cincinnati Enquirer that he was “one of the best members I have ever served with.” He ran for the Senate seat left vacant by Republican George Voinovich and won by a 57 to 39 percent margin, giving him plenty of political capital to wager.

Coming from an entrepreneurial Cincinnati family, Portman is a traditional pro-business Republican who is not afraid of compromising to make a deal. “We’ve now got to pull back, all of us, from our purity test and come up with how we get something done here that deals with the underlying fiscal problem,” he told the Washington Post in July. During his 12 years in the House, that attitude helped Portman author and pass landmark reforms to the Internal Revenue Service and 401(k) and IRA plans. He counts the passage of the balanced budget agreement and the welfare reform bill as his proudest moments from that period.