Sequester 101: What happens if cuts kick in March 1 and four other questions

The sequester is a complex concept with a tortuous history. Here are the basics on the automatic spending reductions set to kick in March 1.

3. Who is to blame for the sequester?

Short answer: almost everybody.

The actual mechanics of the sequester – dangling a deficit-reduction goal in front of a team of lawmakers with a harsh consequence for failure – was dreamed up by the White House, notably by Treasury Secretary nominee Jacob Lew.

That’s the account given by veteran journalist Bob Woodward in his book, “The Price of Politics.”

Yet every member of the congressional GOP leadership who now criticize the cuts as the “president’s sequester” voted for the bill.

Another version of events, outlined by John Avlon of The Daily Beast, claims that the idea came from Speaker John Boehner’s office and the House Republican Policy Committee.

Whatever the case, the bill passed with 269 “yea” votes in the House – 174 Republicans (the vast majority of their conference) and almost 100 Democrats to boot.

On the Senate side, 28 Republicans joined nearly all Democrats to notch 74 "yea" votes.

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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.

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