Make the DOGE cuts permanent, Europe needs an army and other commentary

Libertarian: Make the DOGE Cuts Permanent“To make the DOGE spending cuts stick,” Sen.Rand Paul is encouraging “Vice President J.D.

Vance to have the Trump administration draw up a rescission package” for Congress to pass, and so formally withdraw “spending Congress had previously authorized,” reports Reason’s Eric Boehm.As Paul points out: “If we want to have real savings,” then the Trump administration “is going to have to send this back to Congress, and Congress is going to have to approve of spending less money.” Boehm explains: “A rescission bill can pass the Senate with a simple majority, and Paul believes there would be enough support.” Plus, “a vote on a rescission bill would solve some of the legal and procedural questions about DOGE’s spending cuts.”Defense beat: Europe Needs an Army“Europe had better get its act together,” warns Bernard-Henri Lévy at The Free Press.

“The American president, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state have told us that we cannot depend indefinitely on the United States.” This “historical moment” calls for “the formation of a new European Army, under independent European authority.Not NATO, dominated by the United States and its troops, but a European Army, under European command.” Hmm: “There is, at Europe’s borders, a battle-hardened army of 1.2 million active-duty personnel: the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

As President Zelensky has already proposed, this could be the spearhead of this new European force.” The stakes are as huge: “We must unite or die.If we do not act, we will endure — in two, three, or five years — a new Russian assault, but this time in a Baltic country, Poland or elsewhere.”Legal take: Crack Down on Pro-Terror CriminalsThe First Amendment lets “left-wing radicals” chant “death to America” and “glory to the resistance” led by Iran, but it “doesn’t protect them from punishment for crimes: blocking roads, occupying camp...