A (0:04)

It's Thursday, November 20, 2025. I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. All right, now just remember that days ago, the big news, the big news for several days, even several weeks, was the government shutdown. Now just remember, because this is important. The government shutdown came because Democrats in the Senate would not approve a clean continuing resolution to keep the government fund. And they said they would not do so because they demanded that Republicans come to terms with the continuation of subsidies put in during the Biden administration under the situation of COVID for Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act. And so the bottom line is this. The Affordable Care act has never been affordable. All the promises made about the affordability of the Affordable Care act turn out to be false advertising to conservatives. No surprise there. And the Democrats put in these subsidies, very significant subsidies, against the cost of Obamacare during COVID by saying that under that emergency, they were necessary. And the particular subsidies were timed to end when Covid was safely in the rearview mirror. But predictably, that's not the way it works. When government spends money, when it expands a government program, even when it expands that program supposedly temporarily, it almost never works out to be temporary. Let me just say on the Republicans, because the Republicans won the standoff, the Democrats in the Senate who had said they would not approve a clean continuing resolution to keep the government funded, they eventually did that after the nation's longest government shutdown. And they did so because of political pressure. The cost of having the government shut down was simply too high. So they caved. But they did get one very significant concession from the Republicans, and that was the Republicans agree there would be a vote on the continuation of the subsidies for Obamacare. Okay, so let's talk about how government works. Big government just gets bigger. Government spending, regardless of what anyone says, is really never effectively cut. Even when you hear conservatives, Republicans say, yes, we have cut government spending. Generally, what they've cut is the increase in government spending. And even that over time appears to have amounted to very little. The fact is that the lesson of Leviathan is that Leviathan always wins. And I think it's predictable that these Obamacare Affordable Care act subsidies will actually be funded by the government. I think Republicans will cave on this. I think long term, it's going to be very, very difficult for Republicans to come out and say, we're not going to support this, because after all, the people who are going to be affected by the loss of the subsidies, and I think the subsidies were Wrong. I think it was a lie from the beginning. But the fact is that families have factored that into their economies and it's going to be very difficult for many families, and that includes the majority of families that voted for Donald Trump that are covered by the Affordable Care Act. It'll be very difficult for them to handle this. And I think you're going to hear Republicans come up with a scenario by which it will be funded. I'm not saying that's right. I'm simply saying it's going to happen. But it turns out there is an unexpected wrinkle in this. And that unexpected wrinkle has actually clarified to both sides that after the end of the government shutdown, after Congress and especially Republicans in the Senate have said we will revisit the Affordable Care act subsidy question, it turns out that's going to be a lot more complicated than people expected for an unexpected reason. The reason is abortion. That made the front page of the Washington Post on Tuesday. The front page of the Washington Post had a headline story, abortion Fight Could Doom aca. That's Affordable Care act plans in Congress. Riley Begin and Theodore Meyer are the reporters on the story. And what they are telling us is that there's another Face off, another standoff here and it's going to be over abortion. And at least at this point, the Republicans, deeply under pressure from the pro life movement, they're not going to approve any extension of the subsidies that would in any way cover plans that would include abortion. And you have Democrats who are saying there's no way that they will vote for a continuation of the subsidies that would not include plans that include abortion. And right now, the two sides are, if anything, on this issue further apart than they were during the government shutdown. And I'll just say it's interesting that the leading newspaper in the nation's capital city is focused on this as front page news. And almost no one else appears to be talking about this. And that's just an indication of the fact that if you're inside Washington, guess what? It turns out that something like this looms as a really big story. And pretty soon it will loom as a very big story for all of us. The article begins, quote, democrats emerged from the longest government shutdown in US History with a hard won promise from Republicans. The Senate will vote next month, month on legislation to extend Affordable Care act subsidies that Democrats desperately want to preserve before they expire at the end of the year. Listen to this. Quote, democrats will need Republican votes to pass a bill and a deep divide between the two parties over abortion is already threatening to scuttle any deal. Alright, so this does get complicated. Let me remind you of something, and in the case of many listening to the briefing, I'm not reminding you, I'm informing you because you weren't paying attention to these things back when Obamacare was adopted, way back in the Obama administration. But one of the things that happened in the midst of all of that is that you had pro life legislators who said that they would not agree under any conditions to the passage of the Affordable Care act, or Obamacare as it was more popularly known, if it would in any way cover abortion. And actually the sticking point for this came down to the House of Representatives and it came down to several pro life Democrats and they had to agree, otherwise Obamacare would never pass. And so let me just say it was face saving but not real. When Obamacare was eventually in its final form, let's just say the pro life Democrats not only failed in their effort, they basically disappeared. In other words, one of the most extinct species in the history of planet Earth is a pro life Democrat. You know, just try to find one at the national level. Obamacare is one of the reasons why this Obamacare vote that that came to an end because the issue of abortion was the issue that threatened to scuttle the Affordable Care Act a generation ago, and now it's back. And I just want to point out it's inevitable in one sense, it's not inevitable in another. I want to speak to the pro life movement here of which I've been a part now for a half a century. You know, the reality is that we find ourselves in a very interesting predicament, even in the Trump administration. And so I will argue that some of the statements made by President Trump in the campaign, in the 2024 campaign were troubling, and his support for something like IVF is troubling. But the fact is the Trump administration has delivered on an awful lot of pro life promises and pro lifers still have enormous influence inside the Trump administration. And that's something we need to steward very, very well. But the remarkable thing in terms of world history is that the abortion issue is still being fought out in the United States. If you look at Western Europe, you look even at a nation very close to us, such as Britain, they basically declared this issue to be over, well over a generation ago. And so I just want to say to pro lifers in America, we've got to continue the fight, but we do at least know that we're in the fight. And now I think if you went back to 1973 and the Roe v. Wade decision, and you told Democrats that more than a half century later, a budget deal for the United States would perhaps crack over the issue of abortion, I don't think they would have believed it. They thought history was moving their way. They were absolutely convinced of it. Justice Blackmon, in writing the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, actually said to his clerks, and this is in a lot of the historic record about the decision, that it was just a matter of time until Americans basically no longer thought of abortion as a serious moral issue. Let's just say thanks be to God that is not the case. We have a lot of ground to regain, but at least we're still in the fight. And this front page story in the Washington Post just this week tells us so. Okay, so what we're told is that the lines are right now really clear and they're really partisan. So this is something else that we need to know. This is a little bit different than it would have been, say, 30 years ago, but by now, when you say pro life, you mean Republican. When you say pro abortion, you mean Democrat. And those battle lines are so clearly drawn that this article on the front page of the Washington Post can refer to pro life as Republican and pro abortion as Democrat. And everybody knows exactly what is meant. Those are largely synonyms now. More and less pro life Republicans, and there are more and less pro abortion Democrats. But the fact is, you're just not a factor in the Democratic Party unless you're basically pro abortion. And the fact is, you're not a factor really in the Republican picture unless you are, at least to some degree, pro life. The Post reports, quote, for months, Democrats have been pushing Republicans to extend premium subsidies that Congress put in place under President Joe Biden in 2021 to support most of the 24 million Americans enrolled in ACA insurance plans. Without an agreement, more than 20 million people who benefit from the subsidies will face higher health insurance premiums, and millions are expected to become uninsured. Okay, so that would appear to be a true crisis, a policy crisis, a political crisis, a financial crisis. Just having millions of Americans uninsured is not a good thing for the country. And regardless of whether you're a liberal or a conservative, you basically agree on that. You won't agree on what to do about it, how to solve the problem. But both sides would agree that in itself is not a good thing for the country. But then listen to this quote, Democrats said they wouldn't vote to fund the government unless the subsidies were extended. But Republicans refused to negotiate on policy changes until the shutdown ended. That happened last week, as you know, quote. Now Democrats have less than a month to negotiate a bill that will win the support of at least 13 Republicans in the Senate. ACA monthly premiums for 2026 have already spiked 26% as the expiration date nears. But Republicans are insisting that the subsidies should not be allowed to be used on any plan that covers abortion, regardless of whether the subsidy itself pays for the abortion coverage. Now again, here's something that Christians need to watch. The old adage is follow the money. That's exactly what we need to do. The point being made by pro life activists is absolutely true. And that is that even if because of the Hyde Amendment, that congressional measure that says that federal taxpayer funds cannot go directly to abortion, the fact is that indirect can be just as deadly as direct. And so indirect in this sense means that you have abortion services in several of the state based plans and they're not directly covered, but the plan is covered in the sense that it's subsidized. So it's a subsidy for abortion any way you look at it. In several of the more pro abortion states, they've added a dollar, about a dollar to each premium payment, saying that that would cover abortion costs. Well, first of all, that's fairly ridiculous on its face. But secondly, you can't remove the fact that federal money is subsidizing the entire plan. And when that plan includes abortion, guess what? It includes abortion. Okay, it gets even more interesting because you have a good number of states in the United States that do not allow for any abortion services of this kind. You also have some pro abortion states in this country that are so pro abortion they require any qualified insurance plan to cover abortion. All right, you know, we're one nation, we're 50 states. We often talk about red and blue America, but all of a sudden now red and blue takes on, well, in truth, a life or death picture. And when you come to the sanctity of human life, just understand you have some states that say you can't do that. You have other states that say you must cover that. Just consider the moral divide in this country over the issue of abortion. It comes down to absolutely yes or absolutely no in several respective states. All right, so the bottom line in this article is that the Senate in particular is headed for another standoff. And it just reminds us of the fact that even though the government's reopened, the fact is that the political polarization in this country is still so much a factor. The political divide is still so deep. And it's just a matter right now of which side at which moment can get a majority or a sufficient number of votes to pass the legislation. But remember that President Trump is president, so even if Congress passes the legislation, he has the power to veto it. And if it takes 13 Republicans just to get the vote to vote in the Senate, a veto proof vote is going to be even harder to get. So you thought the political crisis was passed? No. The media has just moved on to some other interesting stories. But this is a promise. It's all coming back. And for Christians, it's coming back with even deeper stakes. Because now it's not just about funding the government as a whole. It is about in particular, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare policies, and whether or not those policies will subsidize the killing of the unborn. Politics matters. Christians, I hope you're aware that on an issue like this, it matters more than most of your fellow citizens will ever understand. All right. While we're talking about some of these issues, I think it's also important to look at some other issues that are a political debate. And we have to see that there are worldview issues that aren't even acknowledged here. So let me talk about two of them. Number one, the Democrats think they're onto a big winning political theme with affordability. And I'll just say that they probably are to some degree, because affordability is one of those things you can't be against. Okay. And so President Trump was at least in part elected in 2024 to a second term because of his argument for affordability. But affordability is used against whichever administration is in office. And, you know, just given the way the economy works and the way even marginal inflation works, things are always, to some degree going to be more expensive. The question is how much are they more expensive or less expensive in relative terms. In other words, if income's going up faster than prices, then people are generally happy. But if you're just looking at the price side, yeah, you're going to have some real political issues. One of the biggest issues is housing. And, you know, for Christians, this is a deeply, deeply important issue because housing is about families and it's about a basic human need. And it's about a lot when it comes to our economy. It's about having a stake in the economy. It's about the hope of eventual home ownership. It's about adding wealth to a family by means of, of housing. And you do have to recognize that housing has been one of the major engines of financial growth, particularly for the baby boomers. The baby boomers, for instance, could buy houses at one point decades ago, $35,000, and sell them for $350,000, okay? So that's a tenfold increase. Now, if you look at the same period of time with variable interest rates, you could have done okay with those investments. But real estate, wow. Real estate, by the way, was also, for all those years, the nearly perfect investment, because you not only got to invest your funds that would come up with a remarkable return at the end, you also got to live in the house. So that's one of the reasons why housing has been such a major issue. And I think from a Christian worldview perspective, we understand why. But I want to talk about what the mainstream media and economists don't want to talk about, and that is the fact that there are two huge reasons for the housing shortage. And the first of them you will hear politicians talk about, and that is the fact that there just aren't enough houses. Okay? There aren't enough homes. There aren't enough apartments. There aren't enough condominiums. There's just not enough housing. Okay? So let's ask the question. Before we get to what I think is the more urgent one, let's just ask the question, why is there not more housing? I mean, because simple capitalism should say where there is such a demand, capitalists should rush in with a supply. Why has that not happened? Well, it's not happened for a couple of reasons, but the most important of these reasons is that a lot of communities have made it difficult to add housing. And a lot of these communities have made it particularly difficult to add the kinds of housing that a lot of people want. And, you know, this is called NIMBYism. That is the protective impulse in communities. Not in my backyard. That's nimby. Not in My Backyard. It's an acronym that comes with a lot of significance. So let's just say that if you have a community of 100 homes. So just to make it easy for us to understand, let's say you have 100 homes. Every single one of them is worth $200,000. All right? And so someone says, I want to build 20 more homes in your community. Well, you know, some of the people say, well, that's going to add traffic. That's going to add cost for services. It just might make my neighborhood a little less attractive. So I have a house that's worth $200,000. I hope in 10 years it's worth $325,000. And adding these other homes may make that more difficult. Not only that, the particular need in the United States is for starter homes. So it's not just that we have a shortage of homes. We have a shortage of starter homes. Now, starter homes by definition are less expensive than some of the more established homes. Okay, so it's the people who have, say the half million dollar homes that don't want $125,000 homes across the street, that would bring down their, their costs. It also would add to the need for services. It might lead to raising of taxes. It adds traffic to the streets. You have to build schools. It's amazing in how many places in the United States old people don't want young people. And they say that by making it difficult to have starter homes and difficult to have enough schools. Okay, so I want to concede, I think that's the main thing in terms of the urgency. The main thing is that largely driven by small is beautiful Democrats, to be honest, but also bipartisan blame can be assigned here when it comes community by community. People have just not allowed enough new projects to begin. And frankly, environmentalism has been a problem here because, or at least it's been cited to traffic issues and all the rest. And you know, it is also true that we have a lopsided population. I mean, it's fairly easy to go build a house in a county seat town in most areas of the Midwest and the south, that's usually not too difficult. You can build a starter house. You can build, for instance, you can go to rural counties here in Kentucky and you can build a starter house and you can build it on a nice piece of property and you might have to wait to get a contractor, but you can build it and you can get the mortgage for it and you can move your family into it. But the problem for the United States is there aren't that many people trying to move into rural Kentucky or rural Alabama or rural Wyoming. Instead, they're trying to move, well, close to the jobs in Dallas or San Diego, Phoenix. You just go down the list. Okay, so that's the big problem. Number one. I want to point to Christians to see the bigger problem under that problem. And this is what you won't hear in terms of statisticians or policymakers, and that is that the breakdown of marriage and the family is a massive, massive part of this. So when you look at the statistics that say this is how many homes, let's use that word, homes. This is how many homes are necessary, you will notice that that is increasingly detached from family. It's increasingly detached from marriage. If you were to go back to the post war building boom in the United States, that is after the second World War, those homes were being built not just as homes, but as family homes. And that meant mom and dad and their children. It came with the baby boom. It came with the suburbanization of America. It came with the standardization in many ways, of the family home as the family house. But the revolution in morality and in social relations has meant that when you have no fault divorce, and then you have a falling birth rate, and then you have compromises of marriage, and then you have cohabitation, which almost every study will show means a significant decrease in the duration of the relationship. And then you look at marriage being separated from sex and marriage being separated from babies, husbands and wives being separated by divorce. And you look at the fact that we are looking at a housing crisis that is largely moral. Nobody wants to talk about that. But if you're going to have a society in which young men and young women don't get married and they don't have children, they don't establish households, but instead everybody needs a house, well, you're going to have housing crisis because everybody can't have a house. Not only that, it's not just a physical problem, it is a massive economic problem. There is simply no way that everyone living in a home can be expected to have the income able to pay for a home. In terms of American culture, that's just not going to be possible. Nobody wants to talk about this because nobody thinks you can get that genie back in the bottle. And very sadly, there is some truth in that. These kinds of social trends are going to be very difficult to reverse. The story came just this week that New Mexico is going to be the first state to offer free childcare for all. And again, that is something that also reflects the fact that you've got a breakdown in family structure and so many other things, and a breakdown in the economy that used to be based on a family unit, the family wage earner. Now that you have the economic picture basically saying that every adult needs to be fully employed, then you end up with all these issues about childcare. But it also points to the fact that in New Mexico they now mandated that it's going to be universal free childcare. But guess what? They don't even have the workers for it. And so you can understand now that the unraveling of society is going to be extremely expensive. Actually, I think it's Going to be far more expensive than society can pay for. I don't think these problems are solvable so long as you have the continued dissolution of marriage in the family. And you have a falling birth rate, by the way. And you would say, well, that means the need for fewer houses, but not if everybody is just an individual who needs his or her own house. It's absolutely ridiculous. It's not going to work. And by the way, you also have situations, recent media coverage saying young Americans are figuring out they can't live alone and so they are banding together to live together. Like that's news. I mean, that's the way the world in terms of urban and metropolitan America has always been. The problem is that used to be for a very short amount of time before those young people moved into adulthood. And that meant marriage and family and all the rest. Except for an increasing number of young people, it doesn't mean that at all. It's one thing to have a bunch of 20 somethings living in a house. It's another thing to have a bunch of 50 somethings living in a house. And that's the America we're headed for. But next, that comes down to the fact that I am holding the print edition of the Washington Post. It was kindly brought to me. This is Tuesday's edition and the front page article is the one I cited. Abortion Fight Kudum ACA plans in Congress. But just to end the day, I have to tell you about the news story that is at the bottom of the continuing page. This is the Washington Post, the most influential newspaper in the nation's capital. And thus, by the way, this is on page A8. So this is considered big national news. Here's the headline. Man accused of Smuggling Protected Parakeets into US in his underwear. I know you're interested. I was interested. We're talking about two rare parakeets. They are protected species and it's illegal to try to bring them into the United States. And so people try to come up with devious means to do them. They've been hidden in boots, they've been hidden in other things. This guy decided he would try to bring them in two of them in his underwear. And guess what? It caught a little bit of attention. I am not going to read to you too much from this story because it's. Well, you can figure this out. It's fairly graphic, the way the birds were discovered and all the rest. But you do need to hear this just as a way of bringing the program to a conclusion. Today, the birds were confirmed to be in stable condition. After receiving care from border veterinarians, they were transferred to the Department of Agriculture for quarantine. So the birds which were discovered in the underwear were determined to be in stable condition. God bless them both. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmohler.com youm can follow me on Twitter or x by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege. Com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.