There’s been lots of talk surrounding the situation in the U.S. with the sequester being enabled. The sheer irony of the situation is clear: a fiscal doomsday device, whose consequences were damaging enough  ($1.2 trillion in government spending cuts over 10 years) to supposedly force Congress to find a less painful solution, failed to do so and was, thereby, detonated today. Foreign Affairs magazine lays out a straightforward graphic to demonstrate where the automatic cuts will take place:

Sequestration as illustrated by Foreign Affairs

So what is going to happen now in light of these automatic spending cuts? CNN says that the real impact will be perceptible not only in the fields highlighted above but also in the education sector, as well as the IRS and border patrol. What kind of implications does this have on the state of American democracy? The sequester is a paradigm of Congressional dysfunctionality that leaves me wondering, where do they go from here?