Congress is working to address three major issues: the looming federal debt ceiling, a $3.5 trillion dollar spending bill, and the bipartisan infrastructure package. However, getting these three issues to a passing vote is proving to be an uphill battle for the legislative branch.

Legislating is often compared to making sausage.

It’s something expressed in Hamilton‘s “The Room Where it Happens”.

“No one really knows how the game is played…The art of the trade…How the sausage gets made…We just assume that it happens…But no one else is in the room where it happens,” the performers sang during the musical.

Mark Harkins, a Senior Fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, explains how these issues are tied together as Members of Congress play politics.