Washington Agenda

With a legislative recess period around the corner, President Barack Obama will give it his all this week to avoid the collapse of budget negotiations between Democrats and Republicans and therefore a possible failure to pay on August 2.

The urgent need to raise the ceiling of the nation’s debt, which reached its $14.29 tillion limit on May 16, forms part of the complicated and urgent negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. The two parties must race against the clock to avoid the United States running the risk of defaulting its obligations to its creditors and causing serious economic consequences for the country.

After the theatrical withdrawal from the negotiations by Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, President Obama stepped into action as a new intermediary. In this role, Obama received the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, and afterwards the Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, this Monday in the White House.

“President Obama will discuss the status of the negotiations to find common ground on a balanced approach to deficit reduction,” stated the White House in a sparse press release.

While President Obama is fulfilling his role as the new mediator in the White House, a few kilometers away, an emerging star from the neoconservative movement announced her plans to run for president on the Republican ticket. The announcement of Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota, has caused a bit of uneasiness among the pile of Republican candidates hopeful for the nomination. This is not without reason because, besides being a charismatic woman who threatens to eclipse even Sarah Palin as the authentic queen of the Tea Party movement, Bachmann will not let her ties with Iowa, where she was born and raised, go to waste.

With this in mind, Bachmann has moved to her native Waterloo, in Iowa, where she will star in the official launch of her campaign for presidency on Monday. All of this is aimed at assuring her head start advantage in the Iowa caucus in February of 2012. In this role, Bachmann will confront the ex-governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, who is still at the forefront of the polls in Iowa and leading the heart of the Republican base on a national level.

In the margins of domestic politics that dominate the agenda this week, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee will revise the “democratic situation” in the hemisphere in a hearing programmed for this Thursday. Roberta Jacobson, the Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, will be in attendance. During the hearing, Ms. Jacobson will offer a detailed panorama of the health status of Latin American democracy in the opinion of the State Department.