Washington Post, via Denver Post/Amber Phillips/08-25-17
President Donald Trump addresses supporters during a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday. Speaking of his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, Trump said, “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”
At this point, it’s not really a surprise that a government shutdown is in the realm of possibility. Congress has faced the threat of one every fall for at least the past four years, since the government shut down in 2013 over Obamacare.
But this year, the threat is more serious, say budget experts, for one reason: President Donald Trump. He badly needs a legislative victory, and he flat-out said this week he would risk a shutdown to get funding for his hallmark campaign promise, a border wall.
Overlay Trump’s potential intransigence on a Republican Party that has long brought itself to the brink of a shutdown, and you have more factors leading to a shutdown than at any time since, well, the last one.
“It’s completely unpredictable,” said Maya MacGuineas, the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget. “A negotiation that one could have seen the outlines for the resolution just got a mini bomb tossed into it.”
PG View: The unpredictability bodes well for gold . . .
