In This Issue:

Leading the Past Week; Legislative Branch; and Executive Branch.

Leading the Past Week -

Congress returned this week from its August Recess period and hit the ground running, with the situation in Syria clouding over everything. Adding to the tension caused by this international crisis was the fact that at once again, and with only a couple of weeks before the end of the Fiscal Year, we find ourselves facing significant uncertainty about how, or whether, the Federal government will continue to operate beyond the end of the month. Adding further to this drama is the potential intertwining of the funding of the federal government with the quickly approaching due date to raise the debt limit and whether the forces that caused the Republican leadership to pull its CR this week, will instead focus on tying their issues to the need to raise the debt ceiling next month. While it is unclear exactly when the government’s extraordinary measures will run out, earlier this week the Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that the Treasury Department will run out of borrowing capacity sometime between October 18th and November 5th.