Picture a packed airport gate. Passengers languish as a delayed flight goes nowhere. The typically cheerful airline personnel are as bored and dejected as the travelers.
Suddenly, the pilot announces departure in five minutes. The huddled masses jump for joy. After the flight crew boards, the gate agents direct two passengers onto the plane and then shut the doors. Enraged ticketholders watch as the nearly vacant aircraft rolls back, taxis, and climbs into the sky. Landbound travelers stare at each other in slack-jawed disbelief.
Welcome to WTF Airlines.
If you like this scenario, you will love Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s latest move.
The South Dakota Republican used “reconciliation” to obviate a Democrat filibuster and provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol funds via simple majority. Thune did this because Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other sadistic Democrats have blocked Department of Homeland Security spending for 10 weeks and counting. Rather than watch industrious public servants starve, President Donald Trump generated partial paychecks via executive order. Alas, those dollars are nearly tapped.
Thune’s severely limited reconciliation squanders resources like a Boeing 777 carrying two passengers. Reconciliation is slow, complicated, and can be implemented only twice or thrice annually. A 777 with 362 empty seats, leaving a busy airport, is bad enough. But when an airport offers three departures annually, this becomes criminal.
Thune’s empty jet landed in the House of Representatives. Republicans there should fill it with reconciliation-ready reforms. Under the rules, these must affect fiscal policy: taxes, spending, and deficits. These ideas should be buckled in before the House flies this back to the Senate for final passage.
The SAVE America Act deserves priority boarding.
Audacious Democrats brazenly approved a referendum on Tuesday to gerrymander Virginia’s congressional seats from 6-5 Democrat/Republican to 10-1 Dem/GOP. (A judge on Wednesday ruled this initiative unconstitutional, triggering a litigation death match.)
While Democrats castrate Republicans in broad daylight, the Senate GOP is too polite, weak, and bashful to steer SAVE onto Trump’s desk. Rather than exhaust Democrat opponents over Easter, Thune sent everyone home presumably to hunt chocolate bunnies.
Pathetic.
To satisfy the Senate parliamentarian, a House SAVE amendment must churn taxpayer dollars to achieve election integrity.
SAVE should establish a Federal Electoral Hygiene Commission to implement this new law. This commission’s $1 billion budget could:
-Help Americans without photo ID obtain it for free, to vote in federal elections.
-Reimburse expenses for acquiring birth certificates—online or in person—to prove U.S. citizenship before registering to vote.
-Fine each state $10 million daily for violating SAVE. Most governors would rather comply than incinerate $3.65 billion annually to shield crooked elections.
-Help cooperative states offer photo IDs, furnish birth certificates, and purify voter rolls using fine revenue. These funds could help states transition from corrupt, mass mail-in ballots to more limited ballots for absent college students, shut-ins, and those away on Election Day.
A new federal agency would be unfortunate. But its activities would influence the budget, a reconciliation requirement.
House Republicans should add the simple question “Are you a citizen?” to the 2030 Census. Every Census checked citizenship from 1820 until 2010. That’s when President Barack Obama ditched this question. Resurrecting it is vital.
Reconciliation should ban census data on illegal aliens from reapportionment, assignment of Electoral College votes, and allocation of federal outlays. Democrats are desperate to impose their illegal-alien political base on legislative boundaries and annual budgets. Stopping such spending is reconciliation-friendly. GOP earplugs will muffle Democrat squeals.
The House could finance SAVE-related spending via the Justice Department’s Assets Forfeiture Fund. It seizes $2 billion in average annual revenue from drug lords and other crooks. This is earmarked for “law enforcement-related priorities.” Curbing vote fraud qualifies.
Meanwhile, this measure should cut taxes, a reconciliation-ready activity. Such reductions must be immediate and retroactive to Jan. 1, 2026. Powerful incentives should tame Operation Epic Fury’s economic headwinds. Robust jobs and growth will buoy GOP midterm election prospects.
“We should end the taxation of inflation in capital gains taxes,” Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist tells me.
The veteran supply-side activist adds: “Now, when you pay taxes on capital gains—because you sold a house, farm, business, or stock—some of that gain is an increase in the value of your home, businesses, or stock. Some is simply inflation. This reform would remove the ‘inflation gain’ and only tax real gains. This would cut most capital gains taxes in half. Or more.”
Democrats will moan that this tax relief is just Republicans boosting the über-rich—never mind that Democrats’ brand-new heartthrob is Tom Steyer, a multibillionaire who cashed in on coal mines and private prisons.
Junking the inflation tax on capital gains benefits far more modest taxpayers. For tax year 2022, “IRS data show that 74% of households with capital-gains filings make less than $200,000,” Americans for Tax Reform reports.
“Tax cuts should be added” to reconciliation, says Forbes Media Chairman Steve Forbes. “Cut personal rates. The two big brackets are 22% and 24%; cut both to 15%. Eliminate the 12% bracket, which effectively brings it down to the 10% bracket. Cut each of the other brackets by three points; thus the 32% bracket would go down to 29%. As for the corporate rate, cut it to 15% for every business, not just manufacturing. Different rates for different kinds of businesses just fuel the lobbying industry.”
The incessant Schumer/Democrat shutdown of DHS during Operation Epic Fury is disgusting, vulgar, and treasonous. These fiends are aiding and comforting America’s enemy during wartime, exactly when this country is vulnerable to attack by organized pro-Iran elements, pro-ayatollah lone rats, or both.
Reconciliation would short-circuit intransigent Democrats and pay diligent ICE and Border Patrol personnel. But limiting this unusual procedure to only that, with so many MAGA reforms in limbo, shoves “missed opportunity” to the breaking point.
A Democrat reconciliation bill would be as tightly packed with policy ideas as the Boeing C-17 that whisked 823 Afghans out of Kabul during President Joe Biden’s calamitous withdrawal in August 2021.
Congressional Republicans should think big. A reconciliation bill is a terrible thing to waste.
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