The Treasury Department estimates that the US will reach its debt ceiling by the end of this year. However, they still have an array of extraordinary measures that gave them about three months of headroom after hitting the limit in 2011. The Treasury said Wednesday it could take “extraordinary measures” to juggle the nation’s finances [...]

The Senate passed, by a 90-1 count, an “Iran containment” resolution that creates that “red line” Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded for recently. And, it puts the red line for Iran’s nuclear program at a nuclear capability rather than a nuclear weapon, a shift from current Presidential policy.

There’s a debate scheduled tonight in Massachusetts between Sen. Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, in that hotly contested Senate race (C-SPAN will cover it at 7pm ET). But it may not have come off all, if you believe Harry Reid’s statement just now on the Senate floor. Here’s what Reid just said, in reaction to [...]

The House passed a six-month spending bill that will keep the lights on in government agencies until March 2013. Democrats and Republicans made a bet that the next Congress will find more favorable terrain for them, and kicked any contentious spending issues into it. They may do the same on the fiscal cliff, but there’s [...]

Congress comes back for what promises to be a quick mop-up session before the election. The main items of business include two expiring authorizations, one for farm programs and the other for the federal budget. The former is up in the air; on the latter, the House and Senate are closing in on a deal [...]

Following up on a previous item, Congressional leaders have indeed agreed to a 6-month stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September. The emerging deal is a sharp contrast to previous occasions when House Republicans used the approach of a spending deadline to insist on deep spending cuts in exchange [...]

House conservatives are running away from one spending fight, asking Eric Cantor to schedule a vote on a stopgap spending bill that would push any budget fight well into 2013. The request would not change the host of fiscal battles expected in the lame duck session; the trigger cuts and the Bush tax cuts would [...]

Stan Collender, one of Washington’s major budget guru, reports that even getting the basic business of Congress done by pre-election deadlines could prove impossible. The basic issue here is that the current budget runs out on September 30. Given the election year, nobody expects a new budget deal by that deadline. However, to keep the [...]

Let’s try to get our heads around what’s happening in the government shutdown/payroll tax cut/unemployment insurance Congressapalooza fight: • The House seems prepared to move forward on their omnibus spending bill, passing it and throwing it in the Senate’s lap. However, they will need to pass it entirely with their own members, because Nancy Pelosi [...]

Congress has apparently decided that it can only deal with one major fight at a time. At the same time that the parties jockey over whether to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, at the end of this week the current continuing resolution to fund the government expires. Currently only one-quarter of the [...]

Democrats signaled that they would not acquiesce to Republican demands for poison-pill policy changes as a condition for passing an extension of the payroll tax cut, and that they would keep Congress in session through the holidays if they didn’t get the extension done. First, Nancy Pelosi spoke about riders to Brian Beutler. Republicans have [...]