Filibuster

The amount of issues the current administration is dealing with potential escalation is growing very fast. It’s Greenland, Iran potential regime change, the board of peace, China trading negotiation, the Japanese debt and currency crisis, Ukraine, Venezuela, Minnesota’s ICE raids and opposition from activists, and Somali allegedly illegal funding from the state, among others. Most of these issues cost money, and some of them, a lot of money. That money comes from the government (typically debt, since we have a budget deficit). Now, there is another item to be added to that list of worries: another government shutdown. Here is how it works: Trump has a majority in both chambers of Congress, but the democrat minority has a tool to stop or delay any bill on the Senate. It’s called the filibuster. The filibuster is a special rule in the U.S. Senate (not the House of Representatives) that lets senators delay or block a vote on a bill. The Senate normally needs only 51 votes (a simple majority) to pass most bills. But thanks to the filibuster, a senator can keep talking and debating forever to prevent the vote from happening. This basically stalls everything unless 60 senators (a supermajority) vote to end the debate. Some democrats in the senate have signaled that due to the incidents on Minnesota, they will delay the funding bill vote using the filibuster, and that’s why you see the probability of a government shutdown at 80% (see chart below). That has direct implications for everything described in the first paragraph. That also means that if there’s a shutdown, we will not have acurate and timely readings for unemployment and inflation data, among others. In other words, we’re flying blind, with a lot of debt, while fighting our adversaries and some of our allies.

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