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Senate Republicans scored a win over their House counterparts in the early morning hours of Friday, officially passing their preferred budget resolution to tackle some of President Trump’s priorities, such as securing the southern border. 

After hours of back-to-back voting on Democratic amendments, the bill to fund border security, energy and defense finally got its vote on the chamber floor. 

“[T]his particular budget resolution… addresses the president’s priority, top priority, which is securing the border and implementing and putting in place his immigration policies, rebuilding our military, and creating energy dominance for this country,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters on Wednesday, previewing the eventual vote. 

The leader and Republicans in the upper chamber started to move forward with the all-important budget reconciliation process earlier this month, pushing their preferred plan through a key committee and clearing a procedural hurdle. 

EXCLUSIVE: DEMS TO FORCE VOTES ON MEDICAID AS IT BECOMES SORE POINT IN SENATE BUDGET FIGHT

The move came despite House Republicans being expected to take the lead on passing a budget bill first. Thune and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., also pressed on even after Trump came out in support of the House’s proposal, endorsing it earlier this week on Truth Social. 

The decision to move forward with the Senate’s alternative budget plan, which is two-pronged as opposed to the House’s effort to pass one large bill, was blessed by Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday, a source told Fox News Digital.

Trump himself did not seem bothered by their effort either, posting on Truth Social, “Thank you to Majority Leader John Thune, and the Republican Senate, for working so hard on funding the Trump Border Agenda. We are setting records, the likes of which have never been seen before, on stopping criminal illegals aliens from entering our Country. Put simply, we are delivering for the American People, far faster and, more successfully, than anyone thought possible. Your work on funding this effort is greatly appreciated!”

SCOOP: REPUBLICAN DANIEL CAMERON BLASTED BY LIKELY GOP OPPONENT AS MCCONNELL SUCCESSOR FIGHT BEGINS

The Senate’s procedural vote earlier in the week triggered a 50-hour debate clock that ended on Thursday night. Then, a marathon of votes, known as a “Vote-a-Rama,” began. 

Senators were able to introduce an unlimited number of amendments, of which many received floor votes. The process forced Republicans to take many potentially uncomfortable votes teed up by their Democratic counterparts. 

“Tonight, one amendment at a time, Democrats exposed Republicans’ true colors here on the Senate floor. For the first time this year, Senate Republicans were forced to go on record and defend their plans to cut taxes for Donald Trump’s billionaire friends. What happened tonight was only the beginning. This debate is going to go on for weeks and maybe months. Democrats will be ready to come back and do this over and over again, because Americans deserve to know the truth,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement following the budget resolution’s passage. 

“Again and again and again, Republicans sent a clear and consistent message from the Senate floor: under their agenda, billionaires win, and American families lose. If Republicans continue with this reckless plan to help their billionaire buddies at the expense of American families, Democrats will make sure the American people know the truth at every opportunity,” the Democratic leader continued. 

In the Senate Republicans’ budget plan, the first reconciliation bill includes Trump’s priorities for border security, fossil fuel energy and national defense. The second bill, to be drawn up later in the year, would focus on extending Trump’s tax policies from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The cuts begin to expire at the end of 2025. 

SUSAN COLLINS VOWS TO OPPOSE TRUMP FBI DIRECTOR NOMINEE KASH PATEL AHEAD OF CRITICAL VOTE

By lowering the threshold for Senate passage from 60 votes to 51 out of 100, reconciliation allows the party in power to skirt its opposition to advance its agenda – provided the items included relate to budgetary and other fiscal matters. The House of Representatives already has a simple majority threshold.

The process is crucial for Republicans, who have a trifecta in Washington, to get key Trump goals accomplished. 

KASH PATEL’S CONFIRMATION AS TRUMP FBI PICK ‘WILL HAUNT YOU,’ SENATE DEMS WARN GOP AHEAD OF VOTE

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has claimed that the Senate’s first budget bill, along with its two-pronged approach, would be dead on arrival in the lower chamber. He has remained committed to including tax cuts in the bill with border security and other priorities. 

The House has managed to move their version through the appropriate committee, but a floor vote has yet to be scheduled. 

A blue California city voted last week to impose a strict ban on camping on public property, including penalties such as fines or jail time for those “causing, permitting, aiding, abetting, or concealing” homeless encampments. 

While activists argue the ordinance “criminalizes” homelessness, one advocate — who himself once struggled with drug addiction and a period of homelessness — tells Fox News Digital that the Fremont City Council’s actions reflect a growing “frustration” with the escalating crisis affecting cities across the state.

“This entire ordinance was born out of frustration regarding their inability to mitigate the homeless issue, and because politicians are afraid or lack political will, in many cases, to make the hard choices that need to be made,” Tom Wolf, founder of the San Francisco Bay-area nonprofit Pacific Alliance for Prevention and Recovery, told Fox News Digital in an interview.

Wolf, who himself was homeless for six months while addicted to fentanyl and heroin in 2018, said that Fremont’s ordinance is “not criminalizing homelessness,” but rather it is “criminalizing the behaviors that are exhibited by people who happen to be experiencing homelessness and are also struggling with drug addiction.”

CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY ALARMED BY HOMELESS CAMPS FOUND IN UNDERGROUND CAVES: ‘HUGE SAFETY HAZARD’

“It’s not as controversial as people and the media are blowing it up to be controversial, because it’s a departure from the approach that we’ve been taking for the last eight to 10 years in California, which is, ‘Oh, everyone just needs a home,’ Wolf said, referring to the state’s “Housing First” model adopted several years ago, which prioritizes providing shelter and temporary housing units to homeless without requiring sobriety or wraparound drug addiction services to people.

The Fremont City Council voted 6-1 last week in a lengthy session in favor of banning camping on any public property “including any street, sidewalk, park, open space, waterway, or banks of a waterway or any private property not designated and equipped for such camping” as well as “any land designated as a high fire risk area.”

Fremont is roughly 40 miles south of San Francisco.

The new ordinance states that anyone “causing, permitting, aiding, abetting or concealing” encampments shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subjected to either a $1000 fine or up to six months in jail. Violators may also be subjected to a temporary seizure of personal property.

CALIFORNIA CITY PASSES SWEEPING HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT BAN ON ALL PUBLIC PROPERTY

“Fremont is not a conservative city,” conservative think tank California Policy Center expert Edward Ring told Fox News Digital. “It’s part of one of the most liberal regions in the country. So, the fact that they’re doing this, it’s not a reflection of some sort of harsh conservative mentality.”

“It’s a bipartisan conclusion, a non-partisan conclusion, that the city council has come to, and they’ve apparently decided that just a ban isn’t going to be sufficient, because there are so many groups associated with the homeless nowadays that call themselves advocates for the homeless,” Ring added.

“But what they’re basically doing by aggressively protecting the right of people to camp in public spaces, for example, is perpetuating homelessness,” he said.

These groups include nonprofits and homeless outreach workers who offer services to homeless people. These services include optional substance abuse treatment, housing, temporary shelter, tents, and even “safe” supplies for drug use, in line with the state-sanctioned “Harm Reduction” model, which focuses on preventing overdoses and infections rather than stopping drug use altogether.

Wolf said he takes issue with much of the Harm Reduction’s strategy because “people are going to still continue to use because they’re out there on the street addicted to drugs.”

As of the 2024 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, which provides a snapshot of homelessness on a single night completed annually, Fremont reported 612 homeless individuals, marking a 21% decrease from the previous count in 2022.

California’s homeless population was estimated at approximately 187,000 after last year’s PIT count, making it the highest in the nation for unsheltered homeless people. The 2025 count is currently underway across the state’s cities.

CALIFORNIA PLANS TO CONTINUE ALLOWING TRANS ATHLETES TO COMPETE IN GIRLS’ SPORTS DESPITE TRUMP EXECUTIVE ORDER

“The purpose of this chapter is to maintain streets, parks and other public and private areas within the city in a clean, sanitary and accessible condition and to adequately protect the health, safety and public welfare of the community, while recognizing that, subject to reasonable conditions, camping and camp facilities associated with special events can be beneficial to the cultural and educational climate in the city,” the ordinance reads.

It continued, “The use of streets and public areas within the city for camping purposes or for storage of personal property interferes with the rights of the public to use these areas for which they were intended. Such activity can constitute a public health and safety hazard that adversely impacts residential neighborhoods and commercial areas. Camping without the consent of the owner and proper sanitary measures adversely affects private property rights, public health, safety, and welfare of the city. Nothing in this chapter is intended to interfere with otherwise lawful and ordinary uses of public or private property.”

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Beyond California, cities like Washougal, Washington, have also adopted anti-camping restrictions, though Fremont’s is unique due to its penalties.

The anti-camping law comes after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that local governments have the authority to ban camping on public property, allowing cities to clear homeless encampments. The decision came after the Court declined to review a lower court ruling that upheld Boise, Idaho’s ban on camping, effectively setting a precedent for other municipalities to follow.

Fox News Digital’s Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.

EXCLUSIVE: Governors from across the country are descending upon Washington, D.C., this week for the National Governors Association’s winter meeting. Among them is Gov. Tate Reeves, R-Miss., who said the Department of Government Efficiency has renewed Republican governors’ optimism in the federal government.

Reeves, who was elected governor of Mississippi in 2019 and re-elected in 2023, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview at the Republican Governors Association that DOGE aligns with Republican governors’ “fiscal sanity.”

“There’s no doubt that Republican governors lead the nation in fiscal responsibility and, quite frankly, in fiscal sanity. Part of that is because, as governors, we have to balance our budgets back home. For us to see the efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency, by Elon Musk and his team with the support of President Trump, it gives us great reason for optimism, because we think that there are literally billions and billions of dollars in spending in the federal government that should not be spent, that are for waste, fraud and abuse,” Reeves said. 

The second-term governor said most Americans appreciate DOGE’s audit and Republicans won’t allow the federal government to spend American taxpayer dollars on “some of the crazy things that have been identified in the last several weeks.”

SURPRISING NEW POLL NUMBERS RELEASED ON TRUMP’S PERFORMANCE SO FAR IN THE WHITE HOUSE

“We believe that we ought to treat the taxpayers’ money exactly the way we would treat our own money. We’re not going to allow our own money to be spent on things that don’t make sense. We don’t think we ought to use the taxpayers’ money, spending them on things like what has been found in the last couple of three weeks,” Reeves added.

MUSK WEIGHS A ‘DOGE DIVIDEND’ TO SEND AMERICANS CHECKS USING SAVED FUNDS

Meanwhile, Reeves can’t wrap his head around Democrats’ rejection of government efficiency. 

“I’m really perplexed as to why Democrats have not actually supported these efforts,” Reeves said. “There was a time in America where all politicians of reasonable stripes would say we ought to try to make government more efficient. We ought to ensure that government money is being spent in the right way.”

Reeves questioned who benefited from the misuse of taxpayer dollars during President Joe Biden’s administration. 

“The Democrats’ opposition to these audits is really beyond my ability to comprehend. The reality is that they are fighting for waste, fraud and abuse in government. It’s almost as if they want that waste, fraud and abuse. It drives you to the question of who’s benefiting from the way in which the Biden administration spent these dollars in the last four years.”

Democrats have called DOGE’s ongoing layoffs and President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders a “constitutional crisis.” Reeves said Trump is doing exactly what he was elected to do. 

“When you talk about their claims of a constitutional crisis, a duly elected president managing the executive branch of government is not a constitutional crisis. In fact, it is exactly what the duly elected executive is supposed to do. President Trump is doing exactly what he got the mandate to do when he was elected overwhelmingly in the election in November. He got that mandate in large part because the Democrats have gone so far to the left that most people in the middle don’t even recognize the Democrat Party of today, and they’re just continuing down that path in deciding that government efficiency is not something they want to support,” Reeves said. 

Reeves added Trump’s return to the White House has empowered governors’ voices on both sides of the political aisle, drawing a stark contrast between President Joe Biden’s and Trump’s presidencies. 

“Having President Trump in office is a big plus, not only for me or for our Republican governors, but really for all governors,” Reeves said. “The first thing I would say about President Trump is that it is just completely different than what we saw during the Biden years, regardless of politics, regardless of policy views. President Trump respects and wants to hear from governors. He wants to know what other chief executives are doing in the states. We have a voice and that’s incredibly important.”

Reeves said, unlike what he saw during Biden’s administration, Trump genuinely values all governors’ opinions, and having access to the president again is encouraging. 

“I think even some of those governors on the other side of the political aisle will recognize that it’s certainly something that President Trump values is our opinion. That’s something that we’re going to see over the next few days, having multiple opportunities to sit down and visit with the president, so that’s encouraging.”

Reeves said Trump’s return to Washington is building on Mississippi’s momentum in education, artificial intelligence and manufacturing. 

“We want to work with President Trump in his efforts to onshore more manufacturing. That’s something that’s important to Mississippi’s economy. Many states across the country gave up on manufacturing 20 years ago. Mississippi never gave up on manufacturing. And that’s the reason we have a workforce that is ready for tremendous economic growth and prosperity. We’re going to take advantage of that,” Reeves said. 

A federal judge on Thursday ordered Trump administration officials to comply with his previous order to temporarily lift a freeze on nearly all foreign aid, temporarily restoring it to programs worldwide. 

In his order, Judge Amir H. Ali, a Biden appointee, said Trump administration officials had used his Feb. 13 order to temporarily lift the freeze on foreign aid to instead “come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension” of funding. 

Despite the judge’s order to the contrary, USAID Deputy Secretary Pete Marocco, a Trump appointee, and other top officials had “continued their blanket suspension of funds,” Ali said.

Still, the Washington, D.C. district court judge declined a request by nonprofit groups doing business with the U.S. Agency for International Development to find Trump administration officials in contempt of his order.

TRUMP’S DOGE STAYS ON TRACK AFTER PAIR OF FEDERAL JUDGE RULINGS

Ali’s ruling comes in a lawsuit by the nonprofit groups challenging the Trump administration’s month-old cutoff of foreign assistance through USAID and the State Department, which shut down $60 billion in annual aid and development programs overseas almost overnight.

Even after Ali’s order, USAID staffers and contractors say the State Department and USAID still have not restored payments, even on hundreds of millions of dollars already owed by the government.

Marocco and other administration officials defended the nonpayment in written arguments to the judge this week. They contended that they could lawfully stop or terminate payments under thousands of contracts without violating the judge’s order.

The Trump administration says it is reviewing all State Department and USAID foreign assistance programs on a case-by-case basis to see which ones meet the Trump administration’s agenda.

TRUMP’S DOGE STAYS ON TRACK AFTER PAIR OF FEDERAL JUDGE RULINGS

Aid organizations, current and former USAID staffers in interviews and court affidavits, say the funding freeze and deep Trump administration purges of USAID staffers have brought U.S. foreign assistance globally to a halt, forced thousands of layoffs and is driving government partners to financial collapse.

Led by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s efforts at the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the department has been what Musk characterizes as a crusade to cut government spending and downside the federal workforce. 

DOGE so far claims to have saved some $55 billion via cuts to USAID, the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But many of DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts have brought legal challenges.

Politics

Two and a Half Cheers for Trump’s New Trade Approach

Trump’s trade plan improves American competitiveness, but leaves some options on the table.

There is so much to like about President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariff blueprint, it’s hard to know where to begin. At the same time, it does raise some knotty issues that the new administration should address adequately before too long.

The president’s February 13 memorandum doesn’t actually put sweeping new tariffs into effect. Nor does it provide a timeline for imposing levies. In fact, the steps it does describe make clear that few if any duties will go into effect before April. Rather, Trump has directed the government to identify situations in which U.S.-based producers receive inequitable treatment by foreign governments. Yet few doubts have been voiced by any observers that major trade restrictions will result sooner rather than later—and unless and until American trade partners take up Trump’s offer to avoid new tariffs by cutting or eliminating their own trade barriers.

Even so, there was plenty in the memorandum for trade-policy realists to cheer. First, Washington is now finally committed to going after non-tariff trade barriers in a serious way. Until now, in order to address foreign subsidies and dumping, discriminatory government procurement, intellectual property theft, Mickey-Mouse foreign health and product safety regulations, and the like, U.S. leaders have relied on a system of national trade laws.

Unfortunately, this strategy was not remotely serious. The trade law system has always been too slow-moving, was too reactive, and worked in far too piecemeal a way. Moreover, the foreign bureaucracies that maintain them are often so secretive that these practices can be difficult even to identify, let alone prosecute. And such failings really count, since these non-tariff barriers have been much more important obstacles to trade than tariffs (which of course are easy to identify). On paper, high enough American tariffs should be able to offset the major damage inflicted on U.S.-based producers by this foreign gimmickry.

Second, Trump has resolved to act against the harm done to American businesses by discriminatory foreign value-added tax (VAT) systems. VATs are maintained by virtually every other economy on earth, and shaft the domestic businesses and workers in two ways. First, they’re charged on American goods and services exports (in addition to the tariffs and non-tariff barriers they face). No American counterpart exists. And second, they’re rebated for companies seeking to sell abroad—including to the United States. (No U.S. counterpart exists for such subsidies, either.)

If the United States had been maintaining its own VAT system, critics of the Trump proposals might be right in claiming that even with the export subsidies, VAT systems in general don’t affect global trade flows—because as with other countries, America’s own combination of import taxes and export subsidies would strengthen the dollar, and neutralize the VAT system’s measures to restore the price advantage of U.S. goods and services in the American market and the world over.

But of course, the United States is the huge global outlier both in terms of using a VAT system and for running trade deficits. Do you think that has had no impact on international trade? Few efforts have been made to quantify the impact of the disparity, but about ten years ago, economists and attorneys at the U.S. trade law firm Stewart and Stewart estimated that it “distorted” American trade flows (that is, added to the deficit) to the tune of $440 billion annually. That sum equaled about the entire U.S. goods and services trade gap at that time. There’s no reason to believe that foreign VATs aren’t supercharging the trade deficit comparably now.

Further, as the global average tariff rates have fallen over the decades (thanks largely to various rounds of global trade talks), the numbers of countries adopting a VAT system has soared. According to the Macrotrends.net website, the global average tariff dropped from 4.79 percent in 1988 to 2.59 percent in 2017. But a 2019 article by global tax specialist Lachlan Wolfers of the corporate consulting firm KMPG notes that the number of VAT countries soared from 25 in 1977 (just before a round of world trade talks achieved “substantial reductions in customs duties”) to 168 in 2019. That’s pretty compelling evidence that most foreign economies have been using VAT systems to compensate themselves for tariff cuts—and that they believe that these policies affect their trade flows for the better.

And thankfully, Trump’s memorandum signaled that the United States is walking away from the tariff grand strategy it has followed since practically the end of the Second World War. Based on a principle known as Most Favored Nation, it prohibited countries from charging different tariff rates for any reason to different countries or different groups of countries. The goal was to prevent what was seen as a disastrous pre-war period of trade-bloc building that was part and parcel of the rising protectionism that deepened and prolonged the Great Depression and helped lead to that global conflagration. The means chosen to create and keep global trade peace and bolster peace, period, was requiring all signatories to treat their trade partners in exactly the same way tariff-wise regardless of how these partners treated them. In other words, it was the opposite of the Trump-ian focus on reciprocity—doing unto others in trade policy as they have done to you.

The problem was that this framework (known, oddly, as Most Favored Nation) locked countries like the United States that were and have continued to be relatively open to trade into whoppingly lopsided commercial patterns with countries that were and have continued to be relatively closed. So the open countries like the United States were obligated to keep their markets open to all comers, whatever those trade partners’ behavior. And closed countries—like Japan and China and Germany—were simply obligated to keep their markets equally closed to all comers.

But about those major issues still to be addressed: Despite the considerable common sense and ethical appeal of reciprocity, following this maxim too strictly could curb the United States’ ability to use trade policy for purposes not strictly related to trade, but crucial nonetheless. Some examples: The Trump administration’s success in using “punitive” tariffs (which it distinguishes from more purely economic tariffs) to win concessions from Mexico and Canada on border security issues, and from Panama on restricting China’s presence near the Canal. Beijing, moreover, has been tariffed for its role in the fentanyl trade.

Yet many other opportunities will emerge for using these tariffs to gain geopolitical advantage—either threatening to raise them as sticks, or offering to lower them as carrots even if the target country’s tariff practices don’t change a whit. In a world where economics and national security inevitably overlap, enough of these policy tensions are bound to appear that it is reasonable to expect their resolution to dilute the benefits of tariffs for domestic businesses and workers far too often. Indeed, that’s what tended to happen during the Cold War, when globalist administrations used access to the vast American market to win or keep allies, and keep neutrals out of the Soviet or Chinese camps, no matter the cost to the domestic economy.

In those cases, what will the president’s priorities be and how does he propose to balance competing economic and geopolitical interests? These uncertainties indicate that the universal tariff that Trump had been contemplating would be the better trade policy lodestar. As I have written previously, this tariff approach could easily accommodate higher duties on especially bad actors like China and its enablers, and lower or no duties on various items that the United States either doesn’t produce at all or lacks in sufficient quantities. Key examples include the Canadian oil and gas needed to keep the U.S. economy awash in energy until domestic production ramps up, and the cutting edge semiconductors that America will continue to need from Taiwan for the years until domestic chip production regains its mojo.

As a result, the universal tariff would reduce the kind of continuing ad-hocery that reciprocity could too easily foster. The consequent greater predictability would also certainly be appreciated by domestic businesses—both exporters and those unable for the time being to avoid much overseas sourcing.

The reciprocity emphasis also seems to jeopardize any hopes for creating the kind of genuine hemispheric trade bloc that could both keep hostile foreign interests out and damp down immigration flows from Mexico and Central America by encouraging economic development. Nor does supporting the latter objective mean a simple repeat of the Biden administration’s cynical contention that such migration could be stemmed mainly by attacking its “root causes.”

After all, the problem with this notion was never with the idea of fostering progress in the sending countries. The problem was that neither Biden nor his border czar Kamala Harris seemed to understand, or want to understand, that until this inevitably gradual process bore major fruit, some serious border security was required. Like most of their pre-Trump predecessors, they seemed equally clueless about measures (like discriminatory tariffs) to make sure that the benefits of trade deals like those negotiated with Mexico and Central America actually reached those countries. Instead, the Biden-ites seemed happy to see vital opportunities in labor-intensive manufactures like garments keep flowing to China and other cut-rate Asian competitors.

None of these challenges and unanswered questions reveal fundamental problems with Trump’s long-time insistence that U.S. trade policy has needed radical restructuring, and that the key to success is basing new measures on America’s matchless leverage in the global economy. But they do indicate that there are more and less effective ways to use this leverage, and that further study of trade strategies—rather than representing a simple delaying tactic—is just what American interests need now.

The post Two and a Half Cheers for Trump’s New Trade Approach appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs

Out of Europe to Save Europe

Durable peace on the continent can only arise out of European security cooperation.

Thirty years ago, the godfather of NATO expansion, the late Richard Lugar, Republican senator from Indiana, declared that for NATO to survive in the post-Cold War world, it would have to go “out of area or of business.” Yet in an irony of history, NATO’s search for ever new frontiers to defend may ultimately bring the alliance to grief.

Despite deeply disingenuous protests to the contrary, NATO expansion to include Ukraine was the primary cause of the war now ravaging eastern Ukraine. So the time has come for the Trump administration to begin to think about what had for 80 long years been unthinkable: America’s withdrawal from NATO.

Far from being a radical improvisation by the mercurial Trump, such a withdrawal would be in keeping with the wishes of Dwight D. Eisenhower who, in 1958, expressed his belief that it was high time to to “wean” the Allies from their excessive dependence on the U.S. “and encourage them to make better efforts of their own.”

Eisenhower was ahead of his time. Today, in the aftermath of the failed expansion experiment, the time has come for the Europeans to look after themselves—after all, they can afford it, we cannot. Their neuroses resulting from the bloodbath of 1939–1945 should no longer be allowed to dictate Washington’s security agenda, which in this century is shifting to the Indo-Pacific.  

For too long our membership in NATO has eroded the republican foundations on which the country is based. Writing to James Madison in 1789, Thomas Jefferson noted that, 

We have already given, in example, one effectual check to the dog of war, by transferring the power of declaring war from the executive to the legislative body, from those who are to spend, to those who are to pay.

Yet NATO’s Article 5 eroded this check—in two ways. 

First, as John Henry, chairman of a pro-constitution non-profit, Committee for the Republic, recently noted, “NATO is the alliance that entangles us most. American presidents have repeatedly mischaracterized Article 5 to claim they—not Congress—can take us to war.” This concern was shared by Ohio’s Republican Senator Robert Taft who, in a speech opposing the ratification of the Washington Treaty establishing NATO, worried that the treaty “obligates us to go to war if at any time during the next 20 years anyone makes an armed attack on any of the 12 nations.”

Secondly, the alliance has empowered members (as well as those seeking membership) to effectively wag the dog. In the case of Ukraine, a relatively small but powerful number of ideologues within the Obama and Biden administrations made common cause with the most virulent brand of Galician nationalists and nearly dragged Washington into a direct confrontation with Moscow.

As President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, recently noted, “There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution which empowers Washington to be in the business of spreading, underwriting and militarily guaranteeing democracy around the world.”

At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference (MSC), Vice President J.D. Vance put Europe on notice: Trump is the “new sheriff in town” who “believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent.” 

And while the Europeans clutched their pearls at Vance’s effrontery, what he said was much in line with the remarks he made to the conference last year, when he noted, 

The problem with Europe is that it doesn’t provide enough of a deterrence on its own because it hasn’t taken the initiative in its own security, The American security blanket has allowed European security to atrophy.

Meanwhile, Europe’s response to the “new sheriff” taking it upon himself to do that which Joe Biden had neither the strength, confidence nor sense to do and begin peace talks with Moscow, has been marked by a combination of panic, bitterness, and, in the case of Ukraine’s Zelensky, fantasy. Last week the Ukrainian president called for the deployment of a European peacekeeping force of between 150,000–200,000 to Ukraine.

For his part, France’s Emmanuel Macron has taken up the rallying cry of the Biden administration: “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Macron, faced with Trump’s determination to end the war with or without Europe at the table, has suddenly rediscovered his once-favored policy of “strategic autonomy.” It is now time, he told the Financial Times last week, for Europe to “muscle up” and develop a fully integrated “defense, industrial and technological base.” 

“If all we do is become bigger clients of the US then in 20 years,” said Macron, “we still won’t have solved the question of European sovereignty.”

A small step in the direction of European sovereignty took place on Monday at the Elysée Palace, where Macron convened what was billed as an “emergency meeting” of European leaders in response to being frozen out of Trump’s approach to Moscow. What resulted was a steady stream of probably empty proclamations of support for Zelensky along with the acknowledgment that, in the words of the UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer, “It’s time for us to take responsibility for our security, for our continent.”

If nothing else the Europeans have gotten the message: Eighty years after the Second World War, it is time they stand on their own. Whether they actually will remains a very open question.

An equally open question—and one that the Trump administration will have to confront once it at long last dispatches with Ukraine—has to do with patching up relations between Europe and its restive neighbor to the East.

Henry Kissinger famously groused, “Who do I call when I want to call Europe?” Macron clearly believes it is he who should receive that call, but, more likely than not, after the German elections on February 23 it will be the leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz, who actually will. Whatever the case, the task of repairing the badly frayed—if not completely broken—relations between Russia and Europe will need attention. The task will be made all that more challenging due to the enmity with which the European and Russian political establishments view one another after ten long years of diplomatic wrangling and then actual war fighting over the fate of eastern Ukraine. 

A sense of how some members of the Russian establishment view Europe comes courtesy of an essay by Sergey Karaganov, a well known political scientist and honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, published last month in the Russian magazine Profile. While it is not at all clear that these sentiments are shared by the Russian president, they are worth quoting at some length because they indicate the depth of anger that exists towards Europe in some quarters of Russia:

Since Soviet times and based on the experience of working with de Gaulle, Mitterrand, Brandt, Schroeder and the like, we have become accustomed to considering the Americans to be the main instigators of confrontation and the militarization of politics in the West. This is not entirely true, and now it is not true at all. It was Churchill who, when it seemed advantageous to him, drew the US into the Cold War. It was European strategists (they still existed then), and not the Americans, who initiated the missile crisis of the 1970s. The list of examples is long. Now the Euro-elites are the main sponsors of the Kyiv junta. They, having forgotten that it was their predecessors who unleashed two world wars, are pushing Europe and the world towards a third. Sending Ukrainian cannon fodder to the slaughter, they are preparing new ones—Eastern Europeans from a number of Balkan states, Romania, and Poland. They have begun to deploy mobile bases where they are training contingents of potential landsknechts. They will try to continue the war not only until the “last Ukrainian,” but soon until the “last Eastern European.”

NATO and Brussels anti-Russian propaganda already surpasses Hitler’s…. Peace on the subcontinent can be established only when Europe’s back is broken once again, as happened as a result of our victories over Napoleon and Hitler, when a change of generation of the current elites occurs.

The mirror image of such ideas are found all over the West, particularly among Russophobe policymakers, scholars, journalists who have taken up the rallying cry of “decolonization” (i.e. the destruction) of Russia.

The challenge the Trump administration will have to confront after the dust settles in the Donbas is the question of a just and secure European settlement, one that takes into consideration the security requirements of every state from Lisbon to Vladivostok.  

May 9 marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe and could provide an opening for the administration to channel what was once known as “The Spirit of the Elbe” to begin the long, arduous process of creating a Europe whole and free. Given the likely intransigence of the Poles, the Balts, the British and elements of the French and German political establishments (especially among Greens and the center-left), this will be perhaps an even heavier lift than ending the war in Ukraine. But the Europeans seem to have willfully forgotten who it was exactly who freed the camps—likely because they are trying to forget who set them up, then operated them, in the first place. 

It is in the American interest to have a semblance of comity on the continent. That requires, among other things, demilitarizing America’s role in Europe. After Ukraine comes the hard work: that of peacemaking.

The post Out of Europe to Save Europe appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics

‘The Thought of American Greatness’

Mike Solana, vice president of Founders Fund and owner of Pirate Wares, sits down with The American Conservative.

(Bryan Pollard/Shutterstock)

You were the first man to talk about a new century of America being an imperial power, a new manifest destiny, and even colonizing the moon. Can you explain for the readers what this new vision is and what it entails?

Well, thank you. I wouldn’t call the goal imperialism, though, and Trump’s the guy who started it with Greenland. I just took him seriously back in his first term, and found the play inspiring rather than buffoonish early on. I looked at Greenland and thought, wait a minute, a more formal partnership here actually makes a lot of sense. There is a long history of our country pursuing Greenland, of Denmark considering the proposal—which, strangely, almost none of us were educated on—and a major national interest in defending the arctic from Russian and Chinese incursion that nobody, for some reason, wants to talk about. In 2019, when Trump first asked the question, it forced me to reflect on all of this, and the more I read the more excited I became, not only for Greenland but for the concept of a growing America.

I didn’t realize the degree to which I’d internalized our decline until the veil was lifted, and suddenly I felt hope for something sort of like the opposite. The country can, and will, grow. We can do this peacefully. And not only on earth. Moon statehood became my compass, partly because it made me laugh, partly because Moon was a wild historical aberration. We landed there. We planted our flag. We claimed the territory… for the world? No. That’s not a real thing. That never made sense. That’s not how any of this works. Moon belongs to America. Historically, spiritually, and practically (once we build our first few bases). 

What is the purpose of Hereticon, and what are the future plans you have? 

It’s hard to get back into the early headspace, and I think we really do all forget how bad it used to be, but I came up with the idea for Hereticon back in 2018 and floated it publicly in 2019. At that time, we were really living in a culture of silence. Dissent on even the most apparently innocuous topics would be met, inevitably, with heinous accusations. But I was protected from the worst of it because I worked at Founders Fund, which was and remains a place that values independent thinking far more than good press. That made me feel I had a duty to open my mouth up a bit more, and I knew that high-level idea of freeing people up to share their crazy opinions again was important. So I decided to do a conference for people banned from other conferences, or this was the premise.

Ironically, the first one was postponed for well over a year by Covid, a virus nobody was allowed to honestly discuss. But when we finally came together it was a blast, like the Olympics for crazy ideas. And we’ll continue to run them every couple years or so.

Let’s talk about Greenland. Of course the American right is most animated about a new Greenland deal. In some places, there are talks of not just a material or structural, but even a spiritual renewal that’s happening. Everyone at this magazine is aware of the material justification of the annexation of Greenland. But what are the civilizational needs?

Right, for me the most important thing about Greenland is not even the strategic location, or the resources. We are talking about America growing. That was impossible five years ago. That was unthinkable. I’m not sure who taught us America was as big as it would ever be. I’m not sure when I picked that idea up myself. But that the entire world was, and in large part remains, shocked at the thought of America acquiring new territory leads me to believe we have all internalized this idea. And it is not the idea of America in its perfect state, it is the idea of American decline. I think if you aren’t growing, you are dying, and a thought so dark carries massive spiritual burden.

But what if we’re growing? What if we are expanding? What if our best days are ahead of us? That’s the attitude that makes a nation great. 

Speaking of civilizational questions, there’s quite clearly a schism between the tech right and the more paleo right, even within the MAGA coalition, on questions of religion, AI, H1-B visas, and a whole array of topics. Is this fatal? Where do you personally fall on this and what might be a more synthetic approach to an alignment? 

It depends on what you are talking about, the alliance or the country? The country will be fine, but the alliance between the tech right and the populist right (if that’s what we’re seeing here, it’s hard to tell) is probably not going to last. You see the seeds of the end in Vivek’s infamous tweet, at the height of the Christmas H1-B debate. He is, it seems to me, an elitist who genuinely believes he’s better than the average American. I think elitism can work for a country. But I think his brand of elitism, with its very obvious contempt for the average Trump supporter, will lead to tech’s marginalization if left unchecked. I don’t see a lot of self-reflection among the tech elite on the core mishap there, so I anticipate the culture clash will grow more pronounced.

In terms of what I think, I’m an American before really any profession or philosophical -ism. I don’t hate other countries, I just only love us, and I want everything to work again. Once everything works again, I want us to be great. I am in favor of policies and people who assist us toward these goals, and completely against the policies and people who don’t.

On foreign policy, the tech right is broadly anti-interventionist. Does that in some way go against the new civilizational expansionist ethos? 

I don’t think there is enough of a cohesive tech right to accurately explain its foreign policy. I think the political movement, if you could call it that, is divided among libertarians, nationalists, and common-sense liberals at the moment. The problem inherent of American expansion is, for the idea to be exciting, you have to believe not only in America, but in the American government. Our government has sucked for a very long time. Our government has not only been ineffective, but has actively worked against the American interest. In waiting for an effective, good government, I myself had really lost hope until recently. Now, I still don’t think we have that effective, good government, but we do have hope. Or, I do, and this has opened me up to the thought of American greatness.

In terms of foreign intervention, there are people who see horror in every American act abroad. This reeks of ideology to me, and I am no longer an ideological person. For me, there’s just one question I ask before I make my mind up about a policy, whether here or anywhere around the world: does this help us? If it helps us, I am in favor. If it neither helps nor hurts us, I am ambivalent, and lean against action. If it hurts us, I am against. And increasingly I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone could see it any other way.

The post ‘The Thought of American Greatness’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

President Donald Trump on Thursday appointed Alice Marie Johnson, a woman he pardoned during his first term, as “pardon czar.”

The announcement came during a Black History Month event at the White House.

The “pardon czar” will be responsible for making recommendations about who should be granted clemency.

TRUMP SAYS CRIMINAL TRIAL IS HAVING A ‘REVERSE EFFECT,’ AS HE CAMPAIGNS AT NEW YORK BODEGA, VOWS TO SAVE CITY

The New York Times first reported Trump was thinking about naming Johnson “pardon czar.”

Johnson was convicted of nonviolent drug trafficking in Memphis, Tennessee, and after serving 21 years, her life sentence was commuted by Trump.

Reality television star Kim Kardashian West met with Trump at the White House a week prior to her release to discuss the great-grandmother’s case.

WHO IS ALICE MARIE JOHNSON, THE GREAT-GRANDMOTHER TRUMP GRANTED CLEMENCY TO?

She was arrested in 1993 and convicted of drug conspiracy and money laundering in 1996.

A series of unfortunate events, including the death of her son, financial troubles and a divorce, led her to involvement with cocaine dealers.

“Back in the 1990s, I was a single mother about to lose my house,” Johnson wrote in a Fox News Digital opinion article. “In a desperate moment, I made a life-altering bad decision to become a low-level player in a drug operation. When law enforcement authorities broke up the drug operation, I was prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison.”

While Johnson claims she never “touched, saw or sold a single drug,” she admitted to assisting in communications. 

While in prison, she worked in the prison hospice, volunteered in the prison church, became an ordained minister, and started writing and directing plays.

After being pardoned, she remained under federal supervision for five years.

KIM KARDASHIAN WEST ADVOCATES FOR ALICE JOHNSON, OTHERS WHO ARE JAILED

She became a champion for overburdened case officers and has fought against unnecessary supervision post-incarceration.

Her work on criminal justice reform led her to launch “Taking Action For Good,” which advocated for clemency and pardons for over 100 people.

She also published a book and partnered with the philanthropic organization, Stand Together.

Fox News Digital’s Kaitlyn Schallhorn, Emma Colton and Alice Marie Johnson contributed to this report.

Two federal judges declined this week to stop the Trump administration from firing federal workers and conducting mass layoffs, allowing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to remain on track with finding and slashing wasteful government spending.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper shot down a request from several federal labor unions, including the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), to issue a pause on the mass firings of federal workers by the Trump administration.

NTEU and four other labor unions representing federal employees – the National Federation of Federal Employees; the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers; and the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America – filed a complaint on Feb. 12, challenging the firing of probationary employees and the deferred resignation program.

The resignation program presented federal employees with a fork in the road, meaning they could either return to the office or they could resign from their positions and continue to get paid through September, though they had to decide by Feb. 6. That date was ultimately deferred to Feb. 12, then subsequently closed that day.

‘GET BACK TO WORK’: HOUSE OVERSIGHT TO TAKE ON GOVERNMENT TELEWORK IN 1ST HEARING OF NEW CONGRESS

The unions moved for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and preliminary injunction to prevent the firing of probationary employees across all federal agencies and furtherance of the resignation program on Feb. 14, and the next day it was sent to Cooper’s court.

Cooper denied the request, though, saying the court lacks jurisdiction over the unions’ claims.

Instead, Cooper ruled the unions must pursue their challenges through the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute, which provides for administrative review by the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

JUDGE EXTENDS RESTRAINING ORDER TO BAN TRUMP ADMIN BUYOUT OFFER TO FEDERAL WORKERS

In a separate case, 14 states asked U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to issue a TRO preventing billionaire Elon Musk and DOGE from accessing data systems at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Department of Education, Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation and Department of Commerce for 14 days after the order is issued.

The plaintiffs also asked Chutkan’s order to forbid Musk and DOGE from terminating, furloughing, or putting on leave, any federal officers, or employees in those agencies.

JUDGE ISSUES RESTRAINING ORDER AFTER TRUMP BLOCKS FEDERAL FUNDS FOR YOUTH SEX CHANGE OPERATIONS

This week, Chutkan wrote, “The court is aware that DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for Plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents.”

She ultimately ruled that DOGE can continue to operate as it is now and keep the status quo.

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Chutkan also, on Friday, issued the court briefing schedule for plaintiffs and defendants to file motions for discovery, preliminary injunctions and dismissals, which stretches through April 22.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth released a video Thursday detailing oncoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts and restructuring that will take place within the Pentagon.

On the date of filming, Hegseth said he met with DOGE and they are beginning their review.

“They’re here, and we’re welcoming them,” Hegseth said. “They’re going to have broad access, obviously, with all the safeguards on classification.”

TRUMP ISSUES WARNING ABOUT WASTEFUL SPENDING, ORDERS ‘RADICAL TRANSPARENCY’ AMID DOGE PROBES, REVELATIONS

He added that many DOGE workers are veterans, and it is a “good thing” that they will find deficiencies.

“They care just like we do, to find the redundancies and identify the last vestiges of Biden priorities — the DEI, the woke, the climate change B.S., that’s not core to our mission, and we’re going to get rid of it all,” Hegseth said.

DOGE’s stop at the Department of Defense comes after reviews of the Treasury, Labor, Education and Health departments, as well as at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Office of Personnel Management and Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The temporary organization has faced an enormous amount of scrutiny over the last few weeks, with some accusing President Donald Trump of giving department head Elon Musk too much power.

Numerous lawsuits have also been filed in an attempt to block DOGE’s access to sensitive information.

$1,300 COFFEE CUPS, 8,000% OVERPAY FOR SOAP DISPENSERS SHOW WASTE AS DOGE LOCKS IN ON PENTAGON

The Defense Department has already slashed 8%, or $50 billion, from former President Joe Biden‘s budget.

“It’s not a cut,” Hegseth said. “It’s refocusing and reinvesting existing funds into building a force that protects you, the American people.”

The budget will be “refocused” on Trump’s priorities, and key programs will not be eliminated, he added.

The department is also reevaluating its probationary workforce, a government-wide action ordered by the president.

“Bottom line, it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical,” Hegseth said. “We start with poor performers amongst our probationary employees, because that is common sense, and you want the best and brightest.”

DOGE fired 3,600 probationary Health and Human Services employees, and 7,000 are expected to be slashed from the IRS amid tax season.

It is unclear how many defense employees will lose their jobs.

There will also be a hiring freeze as the defense department reviews its needs.

“Ever since I’ve taken this position, the only thing I care about is doing right by the war fighters, by the troops,” Hegseth said. “In short, we want the biggest, most bad a– military on the planet, on God’s green Earth.”