(Daily Signal)—Another year, another “government shutdown” fight on Capitol Hill.
As of this writing, 12 appropriations bills need to pass by Sept. 30 or the government will “shut down.” This means that some workers will be furloughed and most agencies will close temporarily.
We had a similar situation last December and the result was a rather pathetic cave by Republican leadership during a lame-duck session and nearly $2 trillion in spending for fiscal year 2023.
This year’s numbers likely will be similar.
The House Freedom Caucus, whose members are conservative Republicans, has vowed to oppose additional spending that leads to more inflation and debt, especially if the federal government continues to let the border crisis burn out of control with no end in sight.
We desperately need to get this problem under control for this country’s future.
At this moment it’s important to take a step back and consider why we seem to end up in these situations all the time. Why is government spending never under control? Why are we always being threatened with a government shutdown and the end of the world?
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, had an excellent explanation in a lengthy thread Thursday night on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The crisis, Lee explains, has been concocted by leadership in both parties to maintain high federal spending and suppress individual legislative input.
22. Given that Republicans currently hold the majority in the House of Representatives, rank-and-file Republicans in both chambers generally believe that the Senate should address spending bills only after they have been passed by the Republican-controlled House, as that approach…
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) September 15, 2023
In his thread, the Utah Republican says party leadership—what he calls the “law firm” (or “The Firm”) of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.—has caught on to the fact that voters and members of Congress don’t like massive, consolidated spending bills.
More on that in a bit.
Lee then writes about what omnibus spending packages entail and how the process has worked in recent years. Lee says a consolidated spending bill typically is written in secret with a few hand-selected appropriators on House and Senate committees.
Lawmakers then release the spending bill just a few days before a potential government “shutdown.” That way, there is little opportunity for debate and the spending legislation advances without substantial changes.
“At the same time, the fast (almost mindless) flurry of legislative action at the end of this legislative charade gives it the false appearance of democratic legitimacy,” Lee writes.
What’s important to note is that the dividing lines on spending bills aren’t necessarily partisan. This is the “uniparty” phenomenon where leadership on both sides of the aisle basically swims in the same direction.
There tends to be more resistance to this phenomenon among Republicans, Lee says, for two reasons: “(1) government spending inexorably grows, and (2) the spending bills advanced by The Firm tend to unite Democrats while sharply dividing Republicans, producing a net gain for Democrats.”
Republican appropriators, Lee writes, generally favor their spending priorities over policy victories, which keeps leadership happy.
Because of the extremely short timeline on these massive spending bills and the threat of a government shutdown, Lee writes, rank-and-file lawmakers typically are browbeaten into voting “yes.”
Anyone who has followed government shutdown fights over the years knows it’s an iron law of the universe that corporate media narratives always revolve around blaming Republican opponents of runaway spending for a shutdown, rather than the big spenders themselves.
This reality is usually enough to corral members to submit and sign off on the spending, objections or not.
The result of all this is that lobbyists and special interests often have more power than legislators in the spending process because they have the ears of appropriators and The Firm, as Lee calls Senate and House leadership.
“It’s terrible for the American people, who are stuck with the horrible consequences of this shameful dance, including rampant inflation and our $33 trillion national debt,” Lee writes.
Importantly, Lee writes that he doesn’t necessarily have an issue with an omnibus spending bill in general. Where he has a problem is with the secretive, rushed process in Congress that makes genuine deliberation impossible.
Lately, the opposition to these tactics has become more intense as members and voters have caught on to the game. The Firm’s process is evolving to create the illusion that congressional leaders actually oppose the omnibus approach, Lee writes.
“That illusion disappears when, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that The Firm’s new strategy is to promise to pass two or three smaller omnibus measures (sometimes called “minibus” bills) by essentially the same, rigged process long associated with the omnibus,” the Utah Republican writes.
Of the 12 spending bills Congress is working on, only the “MilConVA” to fund military-related construction through the Department of Veterans Affairs has passed through the House. But the bill was consolidated into a “minibus” by The Firm, Lee writes in his thread, with two other spending bills from Democrat-controlled Senate committees.
This move essentially played right into the hands of congressional Democrats and would give them leverage in end- of-the-year spending fights. The minibus plan was scuppered only after a few Republican senators objected and stood their ground.
32. Because @SenRonJohnson courageously objected, shortly after the Senate voted to proceed to the House-passed MilConVA bill, the Senate may now proceed to “regular order” consideration of that bill—unencumbered by The Firm’s manipulative plan to subject the Senate to an…
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) September 15, 2023
What Lee is getting at here is one of the essential issues with American governance: We desperately need Congress to act like the deliberative body it was created to be, or the idea of self-government at the national level is little more than a farce.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
