As day one of the government shutdown continues, many people are left wondering what happened? If the leaders of both parties said they didn't want the government to shut down and President Barack Obama, along with congressional Democrats, were poised to negotiate in good faith and make reasonable compromises, how did we get where we are?

Nearly 1,000 people rallied on Capitol Hill today urging Republican lawmakers not to deny millions of aspiring citizens an opportunity to achieve the American dream. The rally of immigrants, their families, young DREAMers, union members and other immigration reform advocates reminded lawmakers a majority of the public supports commonsense immigration reform with a road map to citizenship and expects Congress to find a solution. 

Today in several state capitals and Wednesday afternoon on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., immigration advocates, working families, civil rights and faith activists will urge Republican House members to allow a vote on the recently passed Senate immigration reform bill that includes a road map to citizenship.

The U.S. Senate just voted 68–32 (with 14 Republicans joining all 54 Democrats) to approve immigration reform legislation that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says will move the nation “a big step closer” to building a commonsense immigration system that will allow millions of aspiring Americans to become citizens. 

Now it is up to the House of Representatives to follow the Senate’s lead by allowing a majority of House members to vote on a bill with a road map to citizenship.

Today (Friday), President Obama will join college students at a White House event launching a new push to keep student loan rates from doubling in July. Among the various plans offered, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) plan is the most affordable for students, while the Republican plan tries to “make money” off of students using fluctuating “market rates.”

Talk about team work. House and Senate Republicans have come together with a unique new strategy to attack workers’ rights and shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). And their corporate sponsors are loving it.

Take a look at these videos of working families who are speaking out against Republican lawmakers' attempt to shove the economy to the edge of another manufactured fiscal crisis in order to extract painful benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and protect tax breaks and big loopholes for corporations and the wealthy. Working families demonstrated outside the offices of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs, released a statement yesterday that there is one simple way we can deal with the upcoming Republican-manufactured faux budget crisis designed to extract painful benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid: eliminate it. 

Paul Krugman has a pretty straightforward plan to deal with the sequester that’s due to hit March 1. The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist says, “The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing.” 

He bases his proposal on what Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen said in her keynote address to the Trans-Atlantic Agenda for Shared Prosperity conference at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. Fiscal austerity, such as the sequester and the latest doomsday alert from the Bowles-Simpson duo, is the enemy of real economic recovery. 

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) continues to lead the Republican charge to the March 1 deadline, when arbitrary, across-the-board sequestration cuts in everything from mental health services to public safety kick in. In a cynical drive to wring massive concessions in cuts from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Boehner and the Republicans are willing to inflict hardships on working families and bring disaster to the economy.