Friday, August 12, 2011

battles ahead

The debt ceiling sideshow is over, but several major legislative-executive conflicts are just around the corner.

The biggest is over the 2012 appropriations, which have to be passed by September 30. The debt ceiling law sets specific spending caps for 2012 and 2013, but Congress has a lot of flexibility in deciding what gets in under the cap and what gets left out. Failure to agree could lead to a shutdown of unfunded federal agencies and many of the same scare stories that came out as the debt limit took hold.

In the foreign policy field, the busy and very knowledgeable John Rogin of Foreign Policy magazine has a checklist of unresolved issues still facing Congress. Read 'em and weep.



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