Super Committee Failure a Super Short?

It appears that the Super Committee is giving up and going home. Apparently the idea of compromise and actually being accountable for budget cuts is more appalling than the idea of asking Congress to bailout the Super Committee for their ineffectiveness.  As CNN/Money explains:

The "automatic" budget cuts that were supposed to deter super-committee members from punting won't actually kick in until 2013. And that gives Congress more than 13 months to modify the law.

There will be tremendous pressure to do so.

Athough the market implication of failure to reach a compromise are not clear (at least to some), the early feedback is that the market doesn't like it, as this morning's headline, Dow Sinks 300 Points, explains.

So I got to thinking, does anyone benefit from not reaching a deal?  Certainly anyone who thought a failure to reach a deal would send the market lower could short the market. I think a lot of people expected that such a failure would drive the market lower.  What about people who knew a deal would fail?  Like members of the Super Committee and their staffs?  

Professor Bainbridge has been sharing his and others' views on congressional insider trading recently, see, e.g., here and here, so maybe that's why it's on my mind.  I can't help but wonder, did anyone of those key people take a short position on the market last week before news of the likely failure started to leak out? And does it matter?  

If so, it's not at all clear it would be illegal to do. It is pretty clear to me, though,  at a minimum, it would be very scummy.  

--JPF