Five Quick Things: The Rescission Cometh

It’s fun for the columnist when the columns prove prescient.

Not that my column last week encouraging conservatives to take the win on the House passage of the Big Beautiful Bill was particularly earthshattering in its reference to a coming package of rescissions. It didn’t take a genius to notice that was coming. (RELATED: Take the Win on the Big Beautiful Bill)

But I did find it peculiar how few of the critics of that bill bothered to note the likelihood, or at least possibility, that a rescission was to follow the Big Beautiful Bill. In fact, following the bill’s passage, I don’t know that I saw anybody else even mentioning it.

Which is a bit of a headscratcher.

I don’t know. Stick around and maybe you’ll learn something? We do pretty good work here at The American Spectator.

1. And So, a Rescission

President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, who this column noted last week is (1) possibly America’s most vigorous budget hawk and (2) a very vocal supporter of the Big Beautiful Bill, went on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show Wednesday and laid out the administration’s thinking…

I suggest watching the whole thing, but Breitbart had a transcript of some of the most important parts…

Larry Kudlow asked, “So, rumor has it that we’ve got a big rescission package, an Elon Musk DOGE rescission package coming up, can you confirm it?”

Vought answered, “I can. We’ll be sending that up on Monday or Tuesday, whenever the House is back in session, they will get our first rescissions bill. And, again, this has been proposed and we’ve talked about it, we want to make sure that Congress passes its first rescissions bill, including the DOGE, and we will send more if they pass it. And so, this is the first one, it’s foreign aid, USAID cuts, many of the waste and garbage that was funding, not only wasteful, but hurting our foreign policy, but also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR.”

Vought added that the bill won’t be subject to the filibuster.

That last part is possibly the most important. Rescission bills can’t be filibustered.

House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed Vought on the rescission…

When the White House sends its rescissions package to the House, we will act quickly by passing legislation to codify the cuts.

The House will use the appropriations process to swiftly implement President Trump’s 2026 budget.

DOGE found savings in discretionary spending (such as funding agencies), while our One Big Beautiful Bill secured over $1.6 trillion in savings in mandatory spending (such as Medicaid). Both are HISTORIC and take HUGE steps toward addressing our debt and deficit.

The House is eager and ready to act on DOGE’s findings so we can deliver even more cuts to big government that President Trump wants and the American people demand.

So when this bill comes next week and knocks out a good $160 billion, or maybe more, from the federal budget baseline, what will come next is an interesting national discussion.

You can’t be a Republican member of the House or Senate and vote to keep the idiotic USAID spending, or the funding for the sue-happy communists at NPR. Those items are mandatory yes votes for everyone in the party. (RELATED: Uncle Sam Just Conducted Its Final April 15th Pledge Drive for PBS and NPR)

Which is not to say that a rescission bill will get unanimous Republican support in both houses. But it ought to be pretty close, and one would think there are 215 votes in the House and 51 in the Senate for passage. And any NPR Republicans (that’s my term for somebody who would vote against the rescission; I’m going to guess it won’t catch on for pleasant reasons) who do exist are going to find themselves beset with very well-supported primary challengers.

There won’t be hardly any Democrats crossing the aisle to vote for the rescission. From a branding standpoint, that’s a big problem for their party. They’ll become what they are, which is the party of profligate waste and corruption, in the minds even of people who aren’t very political. (RELATED: Entitlement Fraud Is Now a Stated Aim of the Democrat Party)

And as Vought noted, if the first rescission bill passes, the administration can keep sending tranches of rescissions to Capitol Hill one after another as they find the cuts.

Last week’s column noted the administration can also impound funds that are either counterproductive as appropriated or simply unneeded, given better management of the public fisc.

The point being that these are the tools which can be used to bend the budget baseline downward, so when the administration and Congress begin work on the 2027 federal budget later this year, they’ll be operating from the standpoint of a substantially smaller spending total. Create some real economic growth, which making the Trump tax cuts permanent and a few of the administration’s other policies will do, and it will become possible to actually bring the budget to balance for the first time in a generation.

Of course, the rescission is yet to come. The Big Beautiful Bill still has to get out of the Senate.

2. Stephen Miller Lets the ‘Libertarians’ Have It

Miller, the White House policy director and pit bull spokesman, said something yesterday on X which was so incandescently true as to shock the senses. He was talking about the opposition to the Big Beautiful Bill and just how silly some of the arguments are, and he ate alive those libertarians who are making the perfect the enemy of the good…

I see some self-described libertarians siding with lefty bureaucrats at CBO who claim the Big Beautiful Bill will “explode the debt.” This is based entirely on CBO claiming that extending the current tax rates (not raising them) will “cost” the government $4 trillion in revenue.…

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 28, 2025

In case the X post doesn’t embed, here’s the whole thing…

I see some self-described libertarians siding with lefty bureaucrats at CBO who claim the Big Beautiful Bill will “explode the debt.” This is based entirely on CBO claiming that extending the current tax rates (not raising them) will “cost” the government $4 trillion in revenue.

Since when have libertarians argued that NOT raising taxes “costs” the government money? Private money yet to be earned does not “belong” to the government. This is a Democrat-collectivist argument and I’m shocked to see libertarians deploying it.

Under this ludicrous theory, one could raise taxes to 90 percent on everyone and declare the deficit solved.

BBB cuts taxes, cuts spending, reforms welfare and *ends mass migration*.

On the last point, anyone serious about limited government and improving America’s financial health would understand that ending mass migration is the prerequisite for every other problem we wish to solve.

Of course, true libertarians don’t believe in borders at all…

He’s right, of course, and in particular, Miller has the Congressional Budget Office’s number. CBO’s scoring is an absolute joke and has been again and again throughout history. They always fail to recognize the positive revenue effects of a tax cut, particularly two and three years out or more.

And the fact that supposedly small-government types, including the libertarians, use CBO’s scoring (modeled on socialist/Democrat principles, I might note) to evaluate bills like this one is irritating beyond measure.

Here’s something else Miller noted…

I’ve seen a few claims making the rounds on the Big Beautiful Bill that require correction.

The first is that it doesn’t “codify the DOGE cuts.” A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to “mandatory” spending only — eg…

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 25, 2025

OK, that’s enough budget and rescission talk. We’re too close to the weekend to stay in these weeds.

3. Charlie Kirk, Back From the U.K., Says…

…that essentially it’s a country in paralysis.

Here’s the entire video of Kirk’s segment evaluating what he saw on a trip to Britain, with a little commentary to follow…

The fact that he opens by noting that he managed not to get arrested by the tyrannical British government while there made me chuckle — as it’s the very subject of my last book, From Hellmarsh With Love. I’ll have to send him a copy. (RELATED: The Death Throes of Free Speech in the United Kingdom)

But the most interesting thing Kirk says, and I haven’t seen this said elsewhere, though it’s unquestionably true, is that the U.K. right now is where the U.S. was before Donald Trump came down that escalator and gave American politics and culture a massive, and very necessary, enema. The Brits have allowed their idiot elites to limit what they can say and even think, and everyone in that country knows the direction this has led them is a bad one. But nobody has the guts or the stroke to call out the idiocy of their status quo.

Take Trump out of the equation, and assume the GOP nomination had fallen to someone who couldn’t beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and where do you think we would be right now?

Kirk is saying that’s where the Brits are. I’d say he’s correct.

And I’m very happy to be on this side of the pond.

4. That $20 Million the Democrats Want to Spend Recapturing the Young Male Vote? Might as Well Set It on Fire.

You’ve heard about this plan that the DNC is trying to put in place whereby they want to figure out why men under 45 hate them so much and fix that, right? (RELATED: ‘Get Laid’ and ‘Have Fun’: The Democrats (Still) Don’t Get It)

It’s a little like the “abundance agenda” they’re now touting as a fix for their policy woes. I could pick any number of cliches to describe this, but I’m not sure the ones that come to mind really serve. (RELATED: There Is No Abundance in the Wilderness

I could say these are band-aids on a gunshot wound, but that isn’t really right. Maybe you guys in the comments can come up with a better descriptor for the fact that these people have made it very manifest that they despise the very people they’re trying to court with that $20 million.

Just like the “abundance agenda” crowd is talking about deregulation and unburdening the productive class so it can build things and deliver social goods, when the entire Democrat Party is built around protesting every possible manifestation of progress that doesn’t spring from its corrupt elite.

None of this will work, because none of it CAN work. The Democrats are built on dysfunction because their core base of support is dysfunctional people.

And this is as pristine an example as there could ever be to illustrate it…

This is why the Democrats are doomed. They’re turning to an overweight 22 year old feminist woman as their masculinity expert. I can’t think of anyone on Earth less equipped or qualified to speak for men. It’s like consulting me as an anime expert. https://t.co/9e8PjzRbap

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 29, 2025

Hat tip: Ace of Spades, who had this to say about the dumb discussion this Olivia Julianna woman engaged in…

In fairness, I would say that the people she’s talking about are college-attending “conservatives,” who skew more liberal than non-college-attending conservatives. I’ve observed this ten thousand times myself, including the example of myself.

I would also note that one of the most important drives of any young straight man is to find and court a mate, and with college-attending women being absolutely batshit leftwing lunatics right now, young men will tend to claim “I’m not like the other conservatives” and offer their half-hearted endorsements of the issues that college-age women think are the most important.

But that doesn’t really mean they believe it or, even if they do believe it, that it’s something they’d actually vote on. Everyone is very aware of the very real phenomenon of trolling pro-abortion rallies to get laid. Countfeiting your beliefs to please stupid 20-year-old liberal chicks just a scootch is a very common courting deception.

I’ve mentioned before that Jordan Peterson now thinks that this habit of adjusting beliefs to attract mates may now be working in the opposite direction: Younger Gen Z girls are dating somewhat older guys who have turned against the left, and are now expressing more conservative beliefs.

Some beliefs become socially accepted as “status-conferring” and some beliefs as “status-reducing.” We are seeing a broad repudiation of leftwing bullshit and grievances, and they are losing their former status-conferring appeal. Because they’re dogshit and only marginal, useless, mentally-ill dogshit people believe in them.

Yup.

The great P.J. O’Rourke used to say that you could evaluate a political movement based on how many hot chicks were involved in it. I don’t know that either side has the hot chick vote locked down, but what I can say is that the Democrats don’t currently seem to understand how to make themselves desirable to desirable people — and this comes after a good 50 years of controlling the culture.

That’s a bad sign for them. It’s a sign that maybe none of their stuff works, and eventually, a price has to be paid for that.

5. If This Doesn’t Tug at Your Heartstrings, You Don’t Have Any

I could be wrong in saying that the American character in 2025 is more and more accurately expressed in country music, but it’s just what I see. Friends who were formerly into hip-hop or classic rock or even electronica are talking about Chris Stapleton and Eric Church and Lainey Wilson lately, and it seems like the songs that capture the imagination of large numbers of people now are increasingly country songs.

I could cite a bunch of statistics to back up that impression, but you either agree or disagree, and your opinion isn’t likely to change based on something I could pass along from Grok.

In any event, if you agree with me that we’re becoming a country-music culture little by little, I would explain that by saying the reason is not just that country artists seem to be more talented than what else is out there in the record business right now, but also that what country speaks to is a set of human sentiments Americans are becoming more and more in tune with.

Those sentiments are universal and timeless, but the pop culture has generally conspired to make them uncool. Except the pop culture has itself become uncool, and what is flooding the resulting vacuum is a return to the things we’ve always known.

That’s just a bit of social commentary around a new video by HARDY, who’s one of the newer country artists generating buzz (he and Wilson were the duet that produced that amazing song “Wait In The Truck” three years ago). This is only 10 days old, and I had a friend send it to me telling me she couldn’t keep a dry eye watching the video…

Music is most powerful when it tells the truth. So much of recent pop music is just manifestly based on lies, and that’s one reason it doesn’t — can’t — resonate.

This song does. Country music, well executed, does. I think that’s why it’s having its moment in America.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

The Agony Of 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley

There Is No Abundance in the Wilderness

Take the Win on the Big Beautiful Bill

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