Why Congress is edging up to a shutdown [View all]

By Charlie Hunt / For The Conversation

Congress faces an Oct. 1 deadline to adopt a spending measure to keep the federal government open.

Various reporters will be interviewing serious people saying serious things in the basement corridors of the U.S. Capitol. There will also be political posturing, misrepresentation and either braggadocio or evasion. Politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed congressional expert Charlie Hunt, a political scientist at Boise State University, about the now-perennial drama over spending in Congress and what’s very different about this year’s conflict.

In the past, how did Congress pass budgets so that government could keep operating?

Typically, you would get an actual passage of a full budget for a year. But in the last 20 or 30 years or so, since we’ve become a more polarized country with a polarized Congress, we have a lot of what are called continuing resolutions, or CRs.They’re stopgap measures — not the full budget — and don’t tend to make a lot of changes on a lot of the spending priorities that Congress has.

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