Senate

Moments ago, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer said he would oppose the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and urge fellow Democrats to do the same. Schumer's opposition comes minutes after Sen. Bob Casey said he would also oppose Gorsuch.

"After careful deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court" Schumer said, adding the Supreme Court nominee "was unable to sufficiently convince me that he’d be an independent check” on Trump.

Neil Gorsuch will take the stand again today before the Senate Judiciary Committee to once again school Senate politicians on the value of "seperations of power" despite their endless attempts to make him offer up his personal opinions on controversial legislation.

With political uncertainty near record highs (but equity market uncertainty near record lows), Goldman's Jan Hatzius analyzes the four biggest political risks receiving the most attention from market participants (and stand to create the most chaos if the priced for perfection market is disappointed).

Via Goldman Sachs,

Q: What are the near-term risks on the agenda in Washington?

There are four risks we are monitoring that have recently received some attention from market participants:

After a full day allotted for "opening statements" yesterday, Neil Gorsuch once again takes the stand before the Senate Judiciary Committee today but this time he'll actually be entertaining questions rather than sitting in awkward silence as Democrats takes potshots at his professional career.  Grab your popcorn because today's festivities are scheduled for 10 hours of mind-numbing fun.

After CBO's much-anticipated estimate of the GOP's Obamacare replacement proposal showed that the legislation could result in as many as 24 million Americans losing coverage by 2026, we wondered just how much of an additional bottleneck this report would present to the already conflicted passage of the controversial "Trumpcare." We got the answer overnight, when Goldman's government economists Alec Phillips said that the CBO scoring would likely slow the passage of the Obamacare repeal process.