Take the Win on the Big Beautiful Bill » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Late Wednesday night — actually early Thursday morning — H.R. 1 finally cleared its final hurdles and scraped through to passage in the House of Representatives by a 215-214 vote.

This is the Big Beautiful Bill you’ve heard so much about.

And it’s certainly big — over 1,100 pages. Is it beautiful? Not really.

But it is the bill.

And it isn’t all that useful to complain about the thing. Some of the people out there screeching over its passage need a bit of a reality check.

Let’s start with the complaint that has been utterly ubiquitous on the Right over the past month or so, which is that we’ve got a do-nothing Congress.

They’ve been on vacation — or rather, they’ve been back in their districts — more than normal, is the basis of that complaint. And because of that, since President Trump’s inauguration, they’ve passed fewer legislation in terms of the number of bills than previous congresses have.

Except that’s not a function of laziness, a lack of ideas, or legislative torpor. It’s a strategic decision.

It’s irritating to have to bring this up, but the Republicans have a 220-215 majority in the House and a 53-47 majority in the Senate which isn’t really 53 votes given that Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Mitch McConnell, Bill Cassidy and a few others seem to do everything they can to torpedo the conservative agenda. For the most part, they’re ineffective in that respect, because none of them are all that willing to be the one vote that kills a bill or a nomination. They know there will be consequences for that, and they don’t have the courage to face those.

Nevertheless, that 53? It plays like 51. And the 220 plays like 215; luckily, 215 was all the Big Beautiful Bill needed on Thursday morning.

This matters, because there isn’t a big majority to work with here, and Mike Johnson, the House Speaker everybody loves to hate (which makes him no different than every other House speaker since Newt Gingrich, though Johnson has already posted more wins than any of those guys in less than two years in his current job), has a near-impossible job.

Look, I’m a personal friend of Johnson’s. I’ve known him for more than a decade — before he even got into politics. I can say I know him better than a lot of his critics on the Right, and I can attest he’s with the movement.

But that isn’t going to convince most of them. I get that. The fact that he’s a confidant of Trump doesn’t even move the needle.

Fine. But Mike Johnson is literally the best you will get in the speaker’s chair of this Congress, and I would argue that he proved it by dragging the Big Beautiful Bill over the finish line.

And I’ll win that argument for no other reason than that nobody better than Johnson wanted the job, much less could get enough votes to be speaker.

Mike Johnson couldn’t send a clean, stripped-down budget bill through the House, though that would have been easier, and the budget aspects of the bill might have been better. Know why? Because codifying Trump’s agenda through legislation in 2025 means everything has to be attached to a must-pass bill.

As in, budget reconciliation.

You have to force the agenda through an omnibus bill if you want to pass it, because Democrats will reflexively filibuster everything the rules allow them to.

In the past, that was less doable because both parties had faithless members. The Democrats have none, and you’d need seven of them to overcome a filibuster.

The closest thing to a faithless Democrat in the Senate right now is John Fetterman, whom his party has turned on because he’s made various statements coming off the left-wing reservation. How much of that has translated into friendly votes for Republican agenda items?

None of it. He’s a lockstep vote for his party on anything that isn’t a total consensus item.

So they will filibuster all of Trump’s core agenda in the Senate, and none of them in the House will vote for virtually anything.

That meant to pass Trump’s agenda, Johnson had to pack all of it into one giant budget bill, and he wouldn’t get a single Democrat vote in the House. Given the scant majority he has to work with, Johnson then had to secure a virtually unanimous vote from his own caucus.

It doesn’t appear that Johnson’s critics recognize how damned hard that is.

As I noted in a column a couple of weeks ago, Johnson had to overcome three members of the caucus who didn’t even want to defund Planned Parenthood, for crying out loud. Those three ultimately came around, in a couple of cases because the leadership had to essentially buy them off by giving massive SALT deductions to wealthy people in blue states (SALT deductions allow you to write your state income taxes off on your federal returns, which is objectively horrible policy; it essentially means that low-tax state taxpayers are going to be subsidizing taxpayers in high-tax states). (RELATED: These Are Morons If This Story Is True)

Is that a shitty compromise Mike Johnson had to make? Of course it was. But he has 220 votes. If he had 240 votes, he could have told the blue state RINO reps, “Hey, vote no if you want. We can pass this anyway, and if anybody complains, you can run for cover.”

But he doesn’t have that ability.

And then there’s the House Freedom Caucus, which I would argue are the true good guys on Capitol Hill.

I think Johnson would give the Freedom Caucus everything they want, or at least most of it, if he could. The problem is, he can’t. The Freedom Caucus is generally the top 25 percent or so of the Republican caucus, but for the most part, they’re going to get you maybe two-thirds of the way to a majority on the House floor in terms of getting others to vote for them on a particular weighty item.

They’re right, but they can’t make a majority for the big stuff. So even if Johnson is going to start with the Freedom Caucus’ agenda and try to work outward from there, parts of that agenda would have to be sacrificed on the way to a successful final vote.

That’s too damned bad. It really is. If you let the Freedom Caucus control the budget it would get pretty close to balanced, the results would be skyrocketing economic growth and a vibrant culture and private sector and probably a lot happier populace outside of a more intensely miserable Left (which, as I’ve argued, is something we want and need for our national survival). (RELATED: Five Quick Things: America Needs Despondent Democrats, and We Have Them)

But we don’t have that kind of Congress.

Johnson had to put Trump’s whole agenda into a budget bill and pass it through a pretty disparate House GOP caucus with no margin for error and no grace from any outlying Democrats. Honestly, it’s a historic feat that he pulled off Thursday morning.

Coming on the heels of Johnson managing to pass a continuing resolution on the budget that got us to this point, which nailed Chuck Schumer to the wall earlier this spring and essentially destroyed Schumer as a viable political force within his party, Johnson is actually having an all-pro year so far. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Well-Deserved Disgust of the American People)

Is this budget getting us to smaller deficits and a paydown on the national debt? Hell, no. At least not by the scoring of the Congressional Budget Office. But here’s something to recognize — the CBO’s forecasts generally suck. They don’t understand that lower taxes usually increase government revenue, particularly after a couple of years for those lower tax rates to have an effect on the private-sector economy. They make static forecasts, so any time you lower taxes by X amount, the CBO will tell you it’s a permanent loss of X to the federal treasury.

When if this bill and the tax relief in it helps to grow the economy, which the CBO has ridiculously claimed will not happen, that’s going to mean a flood of dollars into the federal treasury.

Certainly, though, we need hard budget cuts if we’re going to climb out of the hole we’re in.

Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, Russ Vought, is probably the most aggressive budget hawk in America. Here’s what Vought thinks of the Big Beautiful Bill…

OMB Director @russvought: “This bill will help debt and deficits… this is a nearly $2T mandatory savers. We haven’t seen anything like this. It’s history.” pic.twitter.com/lRcX23KroV

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 22, 2025

That’s a hell of a good recommendation.

And let’s remember that we aren’t done with the budget. This bill has to get through the Senate, and it’s very likely to pick up some fleas when it’s there. It’s doubtful it’ll be improved from a fiscally sound, small government perspective — though we can always hope.

But when this thing finally goes to Trump’s desk, there are two levers that can be pulled to make the budget situation better.

The first is a presidential impoundment. Everybody knows this is coming.

Impoundment, in case you aren’t familiar with it — and don’t be ashamed if you aren’t, because it hasn’t happened in half a century — is the process of the president refusing to spend all or part of an appropriation of funds made by Congress.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which Vought and pretty much everybody else in the Trump administration believes was unconstitutional, essentially takes impoundment off the table.

But based on the work DOGE has done and some of the other budget analysis Vought’s office has been working on, there are a whole lot more savings still to be identified. DOGE’s final report to OMB isn’t in yet, and OMB and all of the agencies are still working on where they can cut. The “mandatory savers” in the Big Beautiful Bill are not the final word here.

The impoundment, which probably gets announced a few weeks after the Big Beautiful Bill goes to Trump’s desk, isn’t even the final word.

What will happen after Trump announces that he’s impounding part of the budget and then outlines where the money may have been appropriated but doesn’t need to be spent is that a lawsuit will be filed by one of the usual Marc Elias-Norm Eisen Stalin Youth gang, in some venue-shopped federal court, and some ridiculously unqualified and suspiciously connected Obama or Biden judge will call the impoundment illegal under the Impoundment Control Act, and then there will be an injunction that purports to force Trump to spend the entire appropriation. (RELATED: Dictatorship of Obama Judges)

The optics of that aren’t great for the Democrats, by the way: “You must grow the national debt by this amount even though the executive branch says they don’t have to spend that money.”

It’s idiotic, but they’ll do it. Team Trump wants them to, in fact, because that’s the vehicle by which the Supreme Court can find the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional — and even though this is a disappointingly unreliable Supreme Court, there is still good reason to think they’ll do exactly that.

What an impoundment does, moreover, is to reset the spending baseline for future budgets. As our readers know, despite the desperate need for Congress to go to zero-based budgeting; that is, to start from the assumption in each budget year that no spending is necessary and then adjust that assumption upwards as it reviews the government’s operations and obligations, the way we currently budget is to start from this year’s budget and base next year’s budget on that.

So if you’re impounding $200 billion from this year’s budget, let’s say, then you can take that off next year’s budget as something you know you don’t need.

And you can do this even if the impoundment is tied up in the courts.

Why isn’t all of this work in the Big Beautiful Bill? Because Trump has only been in office for four months. You’re going to have to let Vought and DOGE cook for a little longer than that. We’re talking about the U.S. federal government, for Pete’s sake; you can’t find a larger fiscal entity on Planet Earth with more moving parts than the leviathan in Washington.

And then there’s a rescission, which may or may not be part of the budget mix. The guess here is that if Trump has a big impoundment and it either survives the courts or it’s incorporated into next year’s budget, which will be worked on all summer and much of the fall, there might not be a need for a rescission.

What’s a rescission? It’s a bill which rescinds, rather than appropriates, money. A rescission bill would, for example, incorporate DOGE’s suggestions to cut the federal budget by eliminating waste and fraud.

Interestingly, there is no filibuster available for a rescission bill.

You might ask how such a bill could pass if the items in it couldn’t get into the Big Beautiful Bill, and that’s a valid question. But let’s see.

The point is that while this thing could have been quite a bit leaner from a budget perspective, assuming it gets through the Senate and Trump signs it, Congress will have then codified the bulk of Trump’s agenda by the middle of the summer and there won’t be all that much to do for the rest of the year other than to shrink the federal government.

Which isn’t a bad place to be in.

And if you can’t understand why Vought would be so sanguine about the bill even though it doesn’t seem to be very aggressive in chopping down on federal spending, this is likely why.

Some of this is speculative, I’ll grant. But again, this is an ongoing process. And we are dealing in the world of what is possible with the Congress we have.

Within that world, this is a win. Sure, it’s probably not a beautiful win. It’s a 50-yard field goal with one second left to eke out a victory, and the team didn’t cover the spread.

But given where we are, it’ll do.

So, try to be happy about it, and let’s keep playing. There’s another game coming up soon.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

A Bonfire of the Vanities at the White House

The Cancerous Lies of the Corporate Joe Biden

Five Quick Things: America Needs Despondent Democrats, and We Have Them