Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Upcoming Debt Ceiling and Government Funding Crises
Last week, I teased yet another column about the Democrats' internal battles in the aftermath of Senator Chuck Schumer's wise refusal to give the Musk-Trump Administration the gift of a government shutdown, parenthetically offering this: "Side note: I will be returning again to the ongoing Schumer fallout on Monday." Those waters are still roiling even at this very moment, but because I expect all of that unpleasantness (unfortunately) to continue into the indefinite future, I am going to put that column off until next Monday at the earliest. Instead, I want to start to think today about two massive budgetary battles that will soon threaten the country, either one of which could be cataclysmic in its effects on the US and global economies -- to say nothing of the now-expected constitutional crises that they could trigger. Perhaps surprisingly, the reason to think about these potential blowups now is related to the Democrats' intramural fight about the anti-shu...