Skip to footer

Congress goes on summer break: Top 5 things it left undone

Members of Congress have skedaddled for the month of August, leaving behind a long list of unfinished business.

What did Congress leave in the lurch? Here are five of the top pressing issues.

3. Cybersecurity

J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I) of Connecticut, joined by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D) of West Virginia (r.) and Sen. Tom Carper (D) of Delaware (l.), laid out plans July 24 for legislation to protect critical US industries and other corporate networks from cyberattacks and electronic espionage, at the Capitol in Washington. The Senate subsequently declined to advance the legislation for a floor vote, and then adjourned until September.

  • By David Grant Staff writer

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Everyone agrees such legislation needs to be passed, but nobody can agree what exactly should be in it.

The issue is how best to make the nation's critical infrastructure – such as water facilities and the electric power grid – secure from cyberattack. The rub is that many such systems are privately owned, meaning anything Congress does could be construed as onerous new regulation.

A package of cybersecurity measures passed the House in April, with bipartisan support. However, consensus in the Senate has been much harder to achieve. Leaders of both parties and the Senate’s lead cybersecurity legislator, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I) of Connecticut, worked furiously to reach a compromise on rules that would strike a balance between government imposition of private-sector cybersecurity standards and ensuring that the nation is protected from cyberthreats – right up until leaving town Aug. 2.

But chances for passage were scuttled by opposition from the US Chamber of Commerce and concern by GOP lawmakers that the compromise legislation is still too heavy-handed. Republicans say the bill came up too close to the August recess; with more time, they say, they’ll be able to get to a deal.

Senator Lieberman is not so hopeful, noting that the bill (which has several Republican cosponsors) has already been repeatedly altered to win GOP support. 

3 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.