After obstructing the TrumpRussia probe, repealing their Obamacare repeal, nuking the filibuster, applauding the not-quite-successful Syria attack, and stealing a Supreme Court seat, Congress has declared itself tired and is taking a two-week vacation.  Four days after they come back, however, a deadline looms:  April 28 is when the current budget Continuing Resolution (CR) expires.  Unless Congress passes another CR, the government will shut down for lack of authorization to pay anybody.

GOP Caucus Room: We’re TIRED

Which is fine, because without a new debt ceiling, we don’t have any more borrowing power to pay anybody with, anyway.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, the deal on the debt ceiling reached back when the GOP was obstructing the Obama Administration expired, and a new ceiling took effect on March 16, right around the $20 trillion mark.

This ceiling is the limit on what the US can borrow to pay for things that Congress has already approved in a budget.  (Think: raising your credit card limit so you can pay all your other bills.)  As we also discussed, there are extraordinary measures – aka accounting tricks – that the Fed can do that will eke things out for a few months.  These include suspending investment into the fed workers’ savings fund and the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) which is an emergency reserve used to protect the dollar, or prop up the peso (or attack the yaun.)  The Fed can also suspend new borrowing for the main federal pension fund, and repurpose that debt to keep the government solvent, and open.

Extraordinary Measures

Without an angry bunch of Republicans trying to browbeat a Democratic President into accepting a pharma-full of right wing poison pills in order to prevent the bankruptcy of the United States of America, there hasn’t been a lot of noise around the debt ceiling.   Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has gone ahead and instituted the extraordinary measures, but robbing Peter’s pension to pay Paul only works until Peter is tapped out, which is estimated to occur sometime in the fall.  By November, at the latest, the US will be in default of its foreign obligations.

In the past, just the mere GOP threat that this could happen resulted in the US having its credit rating downgraded.  This meant that the cost of borrowing has gone UP for us, just adding fuel to the burning spiral.

The ceiling, the ceiling, the ceiling is on fire!

Furthermore, the actual budget, not just a CR, needs to be passed by October 1, which is the start of the federal fiscal year.  This is the document put out by the Trump MalAdministration a few weeks ago, which was notable in that – like TrumpCare – everyone hates it, just for different reasons.

Where this leaves us is this: three separate but interrelated actions need to be taken by Congress in order to keep the lights on and the wolves away from the shores.  The authorization to spend money on running the country expires on 4/28.  It needs to be extended until 10/1, when a new authorization for the coming fiscal year is due.  And around that same 10/1, the ability to borrow money to support these authorizations needs to be enhanced with a higher debt ceiling.

All this would seem like a breeze for the GOP, which controls Congress, the Courts and the White House for the first time in 10 years, and who have only to exert the same political will to fund the government that they did to steal it in the first place.

And yet, they failed in exactly that exertion of will while trying to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (the ACA aka ObamaCare) because the Crazy Uncle Fox wing of the GOP still believes in Magical Thinking Ideological Purity Tests.  They didn’t want to just remove the structural supports and let it collapse of its own weight, the way the “normal” GOP profiteers wanted to.  Rather, if they couldn’t burn the whole thing to the ground, immediately, they wanted no part of it, and so formed temporary common cause with the Democrats, who like most Americans, are perfectly happy to leave healthcare in place.

The enemy of my enemy is still a Tuco-Bagger

This same internecine cat fight awaits the budget and debt negotiations.  In fact, it was the same cat fight that took place under Obama – the Tea Birchers have not changed their hoods: they still want huge tax cuts, they still want to zero out spending other than military, they still want non-whites to suffer in silence, and they still eschew all reason and scientific or mathematical evidence of ANY impending doom.

This fight will not only rage in Congress.  As in so many other issues, the Trump MalAdministration is a White House divided against itself.  While Mnuchin is blasé about raising the debt ceiling, and considers it so automatic as to be a done deal, Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, thinks the debt ceiling is a “fabricated crisis. “  As a Tea Bircher Congressman from South Carolina, Mulvaney voted four times against raising it. And Trump also signaled in the past that he expects a “pound of flesh” in exchange for raising it.  While that doesn’t always signal intent with Dat Guy, it does show that he knows as little about the debt ceiling as he does about Every. Thing. Else.

This, of course, means that the budget and debt fights will STILL be loaded with poison pills, as crazy people argue amongst themselves as to who is the Truest Conservative.  Meanwhile, Democrats, the rest of America, and the world, will anxiously pray that we’re not watching an extinction-level event.

At least it would have been over quickly.

What’s worse, Trump’s failure to lead, at all, in any way, coupled with his grip-it-and-rip-it style of presidenting, has created chaos and uncertainty on every front among every observer in every market on the globe.  Lack of confidence in his ability to get anything done has turned leading economic indicators sluggish, a Trump Slump, if you will.  We are actually on the verge of the next recession, foreshadowed by a general contraction that began prior to his election, but exacerbated to the point of certitude by his moronic ineptitude ever since.

The coming Trumpression could be avoided, but Trump and the Birchers don’t rely on evidence, reason or common sense.  In fact, we face a shutdown EVEN BEFORE HIS 100th DAY!  Just them being the guys in charge of fixing the situation is actually making the situation worse.  Confidence in them, AS the United States, is dropping though the floor.

…and, God, that’s NOT good!