hese weird rescission things, apparently you can cut the budget on stuff with only a 50 percent majority, you know, 51 percent.

And so the entire reason that there were not a lot of DOGE cuts in this one is that the place you would do that would be in the larger one. But they did have a bunch of cuts. And now it turns out that there's something called a parliamentarian. How many of you knew that Congress even had a parliamentarian? I guess the parliamentarian just makes sure that Congress is following its own guidelines and only follows the law.

And guess what? The parliamentarian just told the creators of the big beautiful bill. The parliamentarian just explained that the only thing they could do is some minor budget tweaks. They can't have in the big beautiful bill changes in policy because if you want to change policy according to something called the Byrd Rule based on ex-congressperson Byrd that if you follow the rules you can't change policy with a rescission bill. And there were a number of things that were policy changes.

So I asked Grok what the hell what kind of changes they are and most of them I don't understand. But it's stuff like changing the EPA's multi-pollutant vehicle emission standards, blah blah blah blah blah. So a lot of these budget changes are directly connected to policy changes, and we found out this week that they can't do that.

Now, try to hold that in your head for a moment. Does it make sense that you and I did not know that there was a parliamentarian? Yeah, of course. We're not that deep into it. So most of us never heard of this parliamentarian thing. If you had heard of it, would you have known that the rescission process would be different from the budget process and that if you tried to conflate the two, the parliamentarian would shut you down? Well, I didn't know that. But I'm not a member of Congress who just spent five months trying to negotiate this thing.

Are you telling me that nobody behind the big beautiful bill was understanding that the parliamentarian was going to shoot a bullet through the middle of its heart as soon as it was almost done? Are you telling me that nobody involved in that process saw this coming? Are you telling me that they never once talked to her in advance and said, "We don't want to get too far with this unless we know that it can get past the parliamentarian because we're mixing some policy with some funding." Nobody knew this was coming. Are you kidding me?

Right. And again, you and I can be excused, right? We like to be well-informed citizens who can with our opinions maybe help move things in one direction or another in small ways, but we're not supposed to know that. Everyone who is going to vote on this big beautiful bill, every one of them should have definitely known this was coming. And to suddenly act like they're all surprised and people are calling for the firing of the parliamentarian. No, no, don't fire the parliamentarian. Fire every single person who didn't know that they should check with the parliamentarian before they got this far. All of them. Every one of them should be removed from Congress. If you don't know this most basic thing about your own job, how do we expect you to get anything done?

So I don't know what the fate is of the big beautiful bill, but it's looking like it's going to be totally gutted of some substantial percentage of the things that the Republicans were trying to get done. Somebody says that Vance can override her. Vance can override her. You mean if there's a vote of a majority? All right. Well, I guess there might be more we'll find out about this. I don't know if that's true. The part about Vance, but I mean, it's just such a head shaker. I definitely do not feel at this point there, you know, something might change my mind, but I definitely don't feel like the parliamentarian is the bad person. It's a woman, so I was going to say bad guy, but the bad person. I think the parliamentarian is just doing the parliamentarian job. So good luck with the big beautiful bill.

Anyway, but it'd be amazing if Trump got that through without it being totally gutted. His summer would be looking pretty amazing.

Well, there's a Chinese doctor who fled his home country and this is according to Just the News and is doing some whistleblowing on China. And says that China makes the Chinese people who come to America sign a contract. Not all the Chinese people but the scientific people and anybody who's coming to the US and working in science they have to sign a contract with China to help steal US intellectual property and research and anything else of value and bring it back to the Chinese Communist Party.

Now, why is there never a story about Russia doing this? Have you ever noticed that? If Russia is our big enemy, why is it only the Chinese are stealing our intellectual property? Or is Russia doing it too, but they're better at it, so we don't catch them? Like, why would it only be China? It's not like Russia is doing its own Silicon Valley. You know, aren't they just as much in need of stealing our intellectual property? And do you think that Russia has, let's say, some moral or ethical reason not to steal from us? Why would it only be China? I don't know.

But I guess the Trump administration is launching a vetting process for the hundreds of foreign scientists. So we're going to try to catch them. But how weird that China is doing that but not Iran, Venezuela, the Mexican cartels. But how many sleeper cells and spies do we have in t