A rescission package to trim a mere 0.2% from the nine trillion dollar budget is being blocked by the usual fake Republican saboteurs, and a couple of their new allies, writes Matt Vespa at Townhall.
The House did their job and passed the rescission package, but currently, it's in jeopardy because the same group of troublemakers in the Senate; Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) are holding up the measure over concerns about cutting programs that are a complete waste of taxpayer money. What's worse is that they've found new allies in Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Dan Sullivan (R-AK) .
So, let's clear the air on some of the cuts that some of these senators find problematic. First, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($1.1 billion) has been a conservative goal for a generation. It's biased, its CEO is aloof (and biased), and PBS has been overtly projecting Democrat propaganda for years. They don't need our money to stay afloat; they can sink or swim like the rest of us.
The Democracy Fund--$83 million--bankrolled programs for "Yemen community resilience" and spent millions on LGBT nonsense in the Balkan States. The Economic Support Fund--$1.65 billion--produced Iraqi Sesame Street, pride parades in Lesotho, and millions to subsidize Palestinian media companies.
Development Assistance was a $2.5 billion boondoggle that tried to get electric buses off the ground in Rwanda, a vegan food consumer base in Zambia, and civic engagement operations in authoritarian Zimbabwe. Folks, this is first-world, urban, liberal nonsense. For starters, eating 'vegan' is an elite privilege. Most people would die of starvation on that diet, and that goes double for the people of Africa. You need to eat meat to survive. Period. There's a reason why the late Anthony Bourdain compared vegans to Hezbollah, at least in the culinary arts.
The Bush-era President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) isn't going to be crushed, which you know is going to be a liberal talking point. The package preserves the $10 billion program that's saved countless lives, but funding for programs about transgender sex in Nepal, LGBT advocacy in Uganda, and free training in pastry making for male prostitutes are in the trash bin.
International peacekeeping, which has been rife with fraud, is taking a $1 billion haircut.
And of course Lisa Murkowski and now her Alaskan colleague Dan Sullivan object -- which is likely a scheme to pressure Trump to give unnecessary billions in porkbarrel spending to Alaska.
Boy, the "conservative" state of Alaska is turning out to be a lot more socialist and subsidy-dependent than I would have guessed.
We passed a budget of nine trillion dollars but we can't cut just six billion. And we're also not tough enough to do what's right and primary these motherf***ers out of office.
Chuck Schumer says he'll shut down the government before he allows 0.2% to be rescinded from the budget.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is signaling he could plunge the country into a partial government shutdown if Republicans move forward with rescinding just a fraction of a percent of government spending.
The Senate is expected to vote on a request from the White House to claw back $1.1 billion in public broadcasting funding and $8.3 billion in foreign aid next week. Schumer has threatened that Democrats will reject a government funding deal for the upcoming fiscal year if Republicans pass President Donald Trump's $9.4 billion rescission package, which could trigger a partial government shutdown at the end of September.
"Ask the Republicans why they are heading on this path," Schumer said at a Senate Democratic leadership press conference Wednesday in response to a question citing his previous warnings about the alleged harmful effects of letting government funding lapse. "We are doing everything we can to keep the bipartisan appropriations process going. And they're undermining it with rescissions, with pocket rescissions, with impoundment and every other way."
Schumer's implicit shutdown threat is a noticeable departure from his decision to avert a lapse in government funding in March by supplying the votes to pass a Trump-backed stopgap spending bill. The Democratic leader's decision to avoid a government shutdown earlier in the year infuriated the party's base, leading Schumer to postpone a scheduled book tour. Elected Democrats across the country criticized his leadership.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune criticized Schumer's recent remarks appearing to use the rescissions package as leverage in the anticipated government funding showdown later this year. Schumer wrote a "Dear Colleague" letter Tuesday warning of "consequences that will be felt far beyond the halls of power" if Republicans claw back funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid.
"I was disappointed to see the Democrat leader ... implicitly threaten to shut down the government," Thune said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "But I'm hopeful that that is not the position of the Democrat Party, the Democrat conference here in the Senate, and that we can work together in the coming weeks to pass bipartisan appropriations bills."
"Funding the government is our chief priority before October, but that won't stop us from considering additional measures," Thune said, in an implicit reference to the rescissions package.
On to the OBBB ("One Big Beautiful Bill"):
I know TJM has been praising it, but he also won't shut the f*** up about Prometheus, so... shrug.
But other people who do not bang on about Prometheus think the bill is something:
Bill Melugin
@BillMelugin_
If the OBBB passes, ICE will be supercharged on a massive scale:
- $45 billion to more than double ICE detention capacity to roughly 100k beds.
- $14 billion for transport & removal.
- $8 billion to hire 10,000 additional ICE personnel, more than doubling current 5k deportation officers.
- $1.3 billion for ICE OPLA (additional attorneys & support staff).
- $858 million for signing & retention bonuses.
- $787 for state/local participation in ICE/DHS efforts.
- $700 million for technology enhancements.
- $650 million for 287g/local ICE cooperation.
- $600 million for recruitment, hiring, & onboarding.
- $200 million for fleet modernization.
- $20 million to detain aliens with their children.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told me this funding would be a "game changer" for the agency.
This would give one of President Trump's biggest agenda items - mass deportations - a massive shot in the arm.
Colonel Kurt Schilchter, who ran, as he called it, the "most heavily armed car-wash in the Balkans" during the Kosovo War, also praises the bill.
The Democrat crowing about how the Big Beautiful Bill is going to be the doom of the Republicans is about as convincing as Zohran Mamdami's college app claim that he's a black guy; in his defense, he is more Indian than Elizabeth Warren, in a manner of speaking. Though their social media doofuses and regime media toe-sucks are hooting about how Hakeem Jeffries set a record for running his fool mouth and how voters will totally be angry with the GOP for killing eleventy million people -- the BBB is even deadlier than net neutrality, climate change, and not allowing confused children mutilate themselves to conform to their delusions combined -- this is a huge and humiliating loss. It is also a rare exception to the usual GOP MO of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Let's get the obvious out of the way -- this victory capped perhaps the most potent first six months of a presidency ever. Donald Trump came in kicking commie tush, and for the last half-year, he's been landing score after score while melting every temporary setback his detractors have dealt him. Just a month ago, Iran had a nuclear program. Now, it's a smoking ruin. Today, no innocent honor student undocumented migrant can walk home from reading to orphans without living in fear that ICE will disappear him into an alligator-guarded gulag. DEI is DOA, the stock market is setting records, and colleges are bending the knee to the hated King. Heck, he has even ended the Rwanda-Congo War and brought peace to Zohran Mamdami's people.
But, without the BBB passing, it would have been all for naught. The Democrats knew it, and they went all out to stop it. When the sky doesn't fall and the Dow soars higher, they get to explain, "Sure, Trump's brought America a new Golden Age, but his tweets are still really mean!"
...
It's so weird to be saying good things about GOP congressional leaders, but John Thune -- he sounds like an MCU villain who fights Iron Man -- made it happen without blowing up the filibuster or setting a bad precedent.
...
Okay, Mike Johnson. Who the hell is this guy? Where did he come from? When he got voted Speaker, most of us thought he was an asterisk on a placeholder. Mitch would have to score him an eight-ball of his cocaine just to get the preternaturally serene southerner up to "mild-mannered." And yet, he did the impossible, again and again, somehow bringing together utterly incompatible factions to create that nearly invisible area of overlap in the Venn Diagram that was the BBB. He did the impossible. And you know what else they are saying is impossible? Expanding the House GOP majority in 2026.
...
And the losers? I mean, besides the entire Democrat Party? The Lol-bertarian Twins Rand Paul and Thomas Massie believed their own hype of being stalwart, principled iconoclasts standing in the breach. The Freedom Caucus got something by being a pain; these two got zilch and succeeded in doing what many believed impossible -- making libertarians even more annoying. There's no universe where their ideological fantasies pass any House or Senate that might ever exist on Earth.
Trump must crush Massie unmercifully as a cautionary example of those who don't get on the team. Paul still has a cycle to get his head right, but we're tired of smug talk. We want wins on the scoreboard, not some dork showboating for sophomoric incel fanboys by failing to accomplish anything except making sure no one else can accomplish anything, either. And if the passage of the BBB helps rid us of them, that's yet another reason to celebrate.
Kurt's new book, American Apocalypse: The Second Civil War, comes out next week.