It's Wednesday, November 12, 2025. I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Well, the shutdown of the United States federal government, the longest shutdown in American history, is soon to be over, but there are some other

political actions that will have to be taken. The business is basically done in the Senate, and the

Senate had been the logjam, but the House of Representatives is now going to have to gather to

vote on the same proposal, now adopted by the Senate, and then the president, President Trump's

going to have to sign it to put it into

effect. And that means that at the earliest, we're looking at something like the weekend before

the government's going to reopen. So there will be complications that will continue for some

days to come. There are also some big lessons here. Now, as I talked about the original deal that

made possible this progress in the Senate, I've just made as clear as I know how that I think this measure is absolutely insane. It's ridiculous that we find ourselves in this position over and over again.

Conservatives, and that means in particular Republicans have argued that it is necessary to exercise at times the threat

of a government shutdown in order to gain some restriction on federal funding. The problem with

that is that there is very little historical evidence that that has ever worked. And it really

doesn't make sense to have a budget adopted without the funding authorization to spend it. And so most nations,

let's just put it bluntly, adopt a budget and the budget is the spending authorization to separate

the two. And we also have debt limits and other things. All of that just sets up continual

political conflict, which often doesn't appear to accomplish much of anything, but

irritating the American people. Furthermore, there are real life consequences, and even those of us

who think that the size and spending of the federal government are out of control, it doesn't

appear that any meaningful control really comes by this process. But it is a political showdown,

and in almost every political showdown, there are winners and there are losers. So what's the equation there? It appears that

President Trump and the Republicans basically won this battle because the Democrats caved. A sufficient

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