The more the sequester is handled in a piecemeal fashion, the less urgent it becomes to find a complete solution. It starts making more sense for individual legislators to push for narrow fixes to particular sequester-related problems than to try joining a push for a sweeping solution for the whole thing.

The Senate passed, by a 90-1 count, an “Iran containment” resolution that creates that “red line” Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded for recently. And, it puts the red line for Iran’s nuclear program at a nuclear capability rather than a nuclear weapon, a shift from current Presidential policy.

There’s a debate scheduled tonight in Massachusetts between Sen. Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, in that hotly contested Senate race (C-SPAN will cover it at 7pm ET). But it may not have come off all, if you believe Harry Reid’s statement just now on the Senate floor.

The House passed a six-month spending bill that will keep the lights on in government agencies until March 2013. Democrats and Republicans made a bet that the next Congress will find more favorable terrain for them, and kicked any contentious spending issues into it. They may do the same on the fiscal cliff, but there’s not likely to be any action there until the lame duck session, when they’ll know the outcome of the elections. So the calculus could change there.

Following up on a previous item, Congressional leaders have indeed agreed to a 6-month stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September. It continues current funding. However, the votes won’t be help until after the August recess, so the agreement may unravel by then.

House conservatives are running away from one spending fight, asking Eric Cantor to schedule a vote on a stopgap spending bill that would push any budget fight well into 2013.

Stan Collender, one of Washington’s major budget guru, reports that even getting the basic business of Congress done by pre-election deadlines could prove impossible. The basic issue here is that the current budget runs out on September 30. Given the election year, nobody expects a new budget deal by that deadline.

Congress has apparently decided that it can only deal with one major fight at a time. At the same time that the parties jockey over whether to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, at the end of this week the current continuing resolution to fund the government expires. So, some progress has apparently been made on an agreement that would fund the government through the fiscal year.

Dayen’s news roundup from Monday night, December 5, 2011. Important things happening everywhere except our own Congress.

This is the key point from Nancy Pelosi, that Democratic votes will be needed to pass anything, which gives her a voice in the process. A meeting last night in the House GOP caucus showed clearly that there is a major rift between the rank and file and the House leadership on the issue. Lots of Republicans just don’t want to do the tax cut at all. That gives Pelosi an opportunity.