Update: As usual, all the work on this blog is my own. By the time I finished drawing this last night, I was pretty wiped out and too tired to add links. I leaned heavily on Wikipedia for a lot of the information about how appropriations work and got additional information about the sequence of the events from mainstream news sources, primarily the New York Times.

Bloomberg had a really good explanation of the historical developments about how the appropriations process came to be the way it is today: How Congress Got the Power to Shut Down the Government.