Congressional cowards push America to the brink -- again

“You coward!”

That's what House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) called Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) during this week's debate over funding the Department of Homeland Security. Hoyer lated apologized but "coward" could accurately describe all of Congress, as the DHS fight is just the latest in a series of political "crises" both parties have inflicted on the nation in recent years, with no end in sight.

As of this writing, the Senate is expected to pass a measure Friday to fund DHS for another three weeks.

However, passage in the House is not guaranteed as many conservative Republicans object to the absence of opposition to President Obama's executive order action on immigration while Democrats want a long-term solution. (Meanwhile, the debate has revealed ongoing fissures within the Republican party House Speaker John Boehner revealed he hadn't spoken to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the two weeks leading up to the DHS showdown.)

But even if the House passes the temporary financing measure, "Senate Democrats have already dismissed the prospects of any conference committee — so in three weeks, Congress could be back where it stands now," Politico reports.

And between now and then, Congress will face a deadline over the government debt ceiling, which was set in February 2014 when Congress agreed to "suspend" the debt ceiling for 13 months in order to punt the issue past the November election and to the current Congress. Do you have faith the new Congress is any better able to manage this than the last one -- or the one before that? Me neither.

Of course, "the Treasury secretary can use a number of gimmicks to postpone the day of reckoning, and experts think such gimmicks can carry us through September or October," former Fed Vice Chair Alan Blinder writes in The WSJ. But "if nothing is done between now and March 15 -- and I guarantee you nothing will be done -- the U.S. government will begin breaching the national debt ceiling on March 16."

At this moment, the financial markets appear little concerned about the DHS funding issue and aren't even thinking about the pending debt ceiling showdown, although maybe that will be the "next big story" in DC once the DHS issue is resolved one way or the other, temporarily or not. After the debt ceiling, the so-called doc fix, the Byzantine Medicare reimbursement formula for doctors, needs to be updated as the current version expires on March 31.

The prevailing wisdom on Wall Street is that despite a track record of Congressional recidivism, our elected officials won't risk another debt-ceiling crisis as occurred in 2011, when Standard & Poor's downgraded America's credit rating and the stock market suffered its worst downturn since the 2008 financial crisis. Do you think Congress is smart enough to avoid another self-inflicted wound? Me neither.

No matter what your politics, I hope we can agree that America -- and the American people -- deserve better than this kind of "rolling crisis" and that we really have no right to make fun of the Greeks.

Aaron Task is Editor-at-Large of Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter at @aarontask or email him at altask@yahoo.com.