Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Hi, welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My co-host this week, as always, is Cleveland Area Attorney and sometime Republican strategist Jay Carson.

This week, Congress approved a budget deal that will increase spending by $80 billion over two years.

It also suspends the federal debt ceiling until 2017,

which allows the Treasury Department to borrow whatever it needs to meet its financial obligations

and avoid a government default.

Now, the House approved this on Wednesday, 266 to 167,

and then the Senate followed along 64 to 35.

So it looks like we have some bipartisanship in Congress.

What do you think, Jay?

I think it's a good thing.

Again, you know, me and Mike, so often I talk about ideology is important, but tactics are important too.

And pushing another debt ceiling fight, fiscal cliff type situation, that sort of brinksmanship,

it just Republicans never win.

And I think a lot of people in the public don't really understand what the whole

debt ceiling issue is all about. It's not actually about giving the Treasury Department,

the authority to spend additional money or more money. It's just basically giving the Treasury

Department the authority to borrow money to pay the bills we already have that have come in.

Correct. Yeah. And it's one of those things that

it is a, it is something that it has to get done essentially just because of the way things

are set up. So it provides a convenient pressure point that it look, if you want something that you want to have to get done, you threaten

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