Hi, this is Jaime Pettis Pineda from Long Beach, California. I just finished booking my first trip to Europe.

After being eight years on DACA, I finally have my green card and I'm able to travel abroad.

This message was recorded at 12

21 pm on September 24th, 2021.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but my husband and I will still be celebrating this milestone. All right, here's the show.

Congratulations. Yeah, that is wonderful. Have a great trip. Hey there is the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House.

I'm one of summers. I cover politics and I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. So

this week there has been a lot going on and I cover politics and I'm confused.

I mean, you have every right to be confused.

And so in Congress, there is this people keep talking about a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.

And then there's this like infrastructure bill, plain infrastructure bill. And then people are talking about funding the government

and the debt ceiling and there are all these things and factions.

So Kelsey, can you just kind of break down first like what are all those different things?

And why are we talking about them right now?

So we have a couple of different things happening all at the same time.

One thing I think the most pressing thing and the thing with the most real deadline is that the government is going to run out of funding

next week at the end of the day on Thursday. So at the end of September, the fiscal year ends.

And Congress has not extended current spending levels, though everybody, almost everybody in Congress agrees they need to do that.

The problem that they're facing is that Democrats decided to include a suspension of the debt limit.

So for people who don't really understand this totally makes sense.

But the debt limit is basically Congress has to go and set how much the countries love to borrow.

It's a cap on borrowing set by Congress.

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