Revolution Is Easier Than Governing

When revolutions happen, not everyone who helps lead them can govern afterward. Revolution and government demand two very different skill sets, and history shows that revolutionaries are often the first to be pushed aside once a new order forms. Governing is slow, technical work; it is far easier to stand outside the system and rally against it. Consider some of our Founding Fathers: Samuel Adams excelled during the Revolution but struggled as a governing figure and was largely sidelined; Patrick Henry, the author of “Give me liberty or give me death,” refused to embrace the new federal framework and stepped away from national politics; Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense galvanized the independence movement, was judged too radical to play a meaningful role in building the Republic. The gap between those who can speak and those who can govern becomes obvious as soon as trade-offs and priorities enter the picture. Recent events surrounding DOGE illustrate the same dynamic.

DOGE and Budget Realities

On the campaign trail, many people suggested that DOGE would balance the federal budget and “save the country.” Elon Musk floated a best-case projection of $2 trillion saved, with $1 trillion as the realistic goal. In practice, counting future savings from canceled contracts, DOGE has likely saved around $200 billion—only about one-fifth of the optimistic target. Recently, news reports claimed DOGE was being “disbanded,” but anyone who actually read the articles understands that DOGE has essentially been rolled into the Office of Management and Budget for legal reasons. The president can create a task force by executive order, but not an executive-branch department; the president can’t even rename an existing department unilaterally. Some people view this change as a failure rather than acknowledging that $200 billion in savings is a substantial achievement. The truth is DOGE was never structurally capable of hitting the numbers its boosters imagined.

Breaking Down the Budget

Let’s break down the budget to show why. About 10% of federal spending is interest on the debt—completely untouchable. Roughly 60% is mandatory spending, locked in by law, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. These programs cannot be reduced by the executive branch; they require an act of Congress to change. That leaves only about 30% of the budget that can be cut. Roughly half of that—around 15% of the total budget—is the military, which DOGE was never expected to seriously target. That leaves only the remaining 15% of federal spending as fair game.

Non-defense discretionary spending totals about $800 billion, which means that a realistic maximum target for DOGE was always going to be well under the trillion-dollar range. In that context, roughly $200 billion in current and future savings is actually impressive, even if some of it comes from reductions in future contract spending rather than immediate outlays. Thus, the conclusion is that DOGE did what it could, and that the promises made by Musk and Vivek greatly overestimated the powers of the executive branch when it comes to the budget.

Continuing Resolutions (CRs)

A lot of the base is upset that essentially the only important laws that have been passed have been CRs. The fact of the matter is that a CR is essentially the only way to pass partisan things at this point. The efficiency of partisan matters is halted by the filibuster, in which you need 60 votes in the Senate to effectively pass anything.

Why the Filibuster Requires 60 Votes

Let us walk through why the filibuster is 60 votes. In the House, when a bill is brought forward, debate time is limited. There is only a set number of hours before the vote happens. This is not the case in the Senate. In the Senate, a single Senator may delay a bill for essentially infinite time, and even a handful of Senators can greatly increase that delay.

So how does anything get passed? Through cloture. Cloture is relatively new. Before the 1970s, Senators would eventually let votes happen even if they disagreed with the content of the bill. However, since the 70s there has been growing stalling, and now, in order to bypass the stalling there must be a vote to force a vote—and that’s the filibuster. If a bill gets 60 votes in the Senate to force a vote, then the Senate can bypass all the stalling. If you cannot get 60 votes, then the stalling is essentially infinite. This has been the main killer of legislation, and thus has shifted more power to the executive branch.

How CRs Function

So how does anything get done? Continuing Resolutions. They are one of the few pieces of law that bypass the typical stalling methods. This comes with strings attached, as CRs can only deal with certain topics and really can’t change the law. For example, earlier this year, the Senate was told they cannot repeal the NFA gun tax using a CR, but they can set the tax to $0. So CRs become the main way that laws are passed. The One Big Beautiful Bill is a CR that, using funding, changed US policy. For example, greatly expanding ICE and Border Security funds leads to more deportations and better border security.

CRs are the natural conclusion of the filibustered world. Single-page bills are useless and meaningless. For one, the law is incredibly complex, and as we have seen with judges, if you are not very precise or leave anything up to interpretation, it will get struck down. The amount of laws that nearly any bill touches—besides renaming post offices—makes single-page bills impossible to do anything effective. Single-issue bills are also mostly performative. Voter ID? Filibustered. Codifying any of the President’s EOs? Filibustered. Name it, it will likely be filibustered. The Democrats vote as a monolith 99% of the time and can block anything in the Senate realistically. GOP Senators, on the other hand, often don’t fully use the filibuster because they are cowards. But these are the cards we have been dealt.

So just get rid of the filibuster? Yeah, that is not happening from the GOP. The GOP will not be getting rid of it anytime soon, as it would require 51 votes. The Founding Fathers created the Senate with the idea that it would prevent factions from taking over, and only long-term trends would end up winning a reasonable amount of Senate power. About 10 Senators are MAGA and were elected since 2016, out of 23 Republicans who have entered the Senate since 2016—so around a 40% rate. While the Tea Party barely managed to get five Senators. On the Democrat side, despite modern progressives blowing up in size, only a few Senators are as progressive as the Squad. Moderate members of the parties typically win Senate seats, and this is by design. The Senate is designed to stall progress to ensure that only truly popular ideas, that stand the test of time, become law. To prevent “factions,” in the wording of our Founding Fathers. Thus the conclusion: CRs are your best bet.

“Just Defund the Opponents”

A while ago, Berkeley had a riot that included several acts of violence, and many influencers were calling on Trump to enact the Insurrection Act and then defund Berkeley. This wasn’t going to happen. This is simply influencers not understanding the law and how it can be applied.

The Insurrection Act and Enforcement Limits

First off, what requirements are needed to enact the Insurrection Act? The lack of ability to enforce the law. People WERE being arrested, even if fewer people than should have been (but that’s the fault of the California police and California DAs), but the law was able to be enforced. Thus, President Trump had no standing to invoke it. Same with the 2020 Summer of Love. As violent as it got, ultimately the law COULD have been enforced by local law enforcement; in fact, many times, law enforcement did corral the rioters away from certain areas.

Defunding Berkeley

Then the same influencers asked Trump to defund Berkeley. There is a very specific legal requirement for the federal government to be able to defund universities. The biggest one is the Titles by the Department of Education. If the school allows actions that harm protected classes, then they could be defunded—these actions must be long-term enough to be a pattern. Remember when the Trump administration defunded based on transgender athletes and antisemitism on campus? Well, that’s because both gender and religion ARE protected classes (political opinions are not), and there was a long-term pattern of violating the Titles. There are a couple of clips of the rioters calling the people attending the TPUSA event “white boys” and stuff akin to that; however, it almost certainly isn’t long-term enough or enough of a pattern for the courts to allow Trump to do that.

There are laws, and Trump follows them. Even if the headlines make it sound otherwise, Trump has essentially 100% of the time obeyed the law. Even in cases that headlines make it sound like he is violating something—for example the flag-burning EO—nowhere in there did it ban the burning of flags; it simply asks the DOJ that if someone is burning a flag AND that action is breaking the law (such as no public fires on government property), then the DOJ is asked to throw the book at them.

President Trump will not be randomly breaking the law. There is an incredibly large number of lawyers, all of whom are 10x brighter than you or I, advising him on how to handle certain cases. This is the same with arresting people. Fauci will never be arrested, neither will Obama, nor either Clinton. Either they did not violate the law (approving FDA rules on vaccines is not against the law) or anything they did do is probably past the statute of limitations. This is why the DOJ is going after Letitia James’s mortgage, or when they indicted James Comey, the statute of limitations would have expired around two days later.

Rules Changing H-1B Visas

“Trump should just halt H-1B visas.” Sounds great but will never happen without Congress. Let us walk through this slowly. The first argument is that Trump should follow his 2020 rules that blocked H-1B visas from entering the country for a few months. COVID caused unemployment to spike to nearly 20%. That is a national emergency. Unemployment between 4-5% is not. The courts would strike this down as an abuse of power. Trump isn’t going to make something that will instantly be struck down.

Trump should make his rules similar to that of 2018–2020, when H-1B visa application denial rates spiked to over 20%, up from less than 10% before 2017. How did this happen? In April 2017, Trump, under the Buy American, Hire American EO, asked USCIS to be much harsher on H-1B visas. This allowed the USCIS (the office in charge of visas) to begin making internal changes on rules interpretations, which took about a year to fully implement. First signs of its success appeared a little over 8 months later, with full effect taking about a year.

So why haven’t we seen the massive spike in H-1B visas? The Trump administration only got their preferred Director of the USCIS into the position in July. If he immediately began working on internal rule changes, they won’t be implemented until around March of the next year. So maybe summer of 2026, expect H-1B visa denials to go up a bit, but ultimately this is not a solution to the problem, and realistically doesn’t do much on H-1Bs.

H-1Bs have a Congressional-set cap of around 85k new ones every year, and renewals are unlimited. The cap is effectively a minimum. There are around 300k new applicants each year. To approve fewer than 85k, USCIS would need a denial rate of 72%, which isn’t happening. Policies allowing that would be too broad and would be struck down by the courts.

So what should the GOP do? H-1B visa abuse is a problem, but the DOJ is investigating, which takes time. Congress will almost certainly not lower the cap due to the filibuster. Members of the GOP should focus on OPT (student work visas, unlimited, created by the President and USCIS) and H4-EAD (work visas for H-1B spouses). Rumors suggest the Trump administration is working on OPT, with Forbes correctly leaking the $100k H-1B fees. These are not expected until early–mid 2026. H4-EAD is tied up in DOJ arguments over executive authority.

The Takeaway

The takeaway here isn’t that the situation is hopeless, but that politics is a long-term game. We are cementing MAGA and America First as the next torch to carry the GOP for the next 20–40 years, in the same way Reaganism and Bushism dominated the GOP for 30–40 years. We have already succeeded far more than the Tea Party ever did, showing that MAGA is not a flash in the pan, but rather the foundation for long-term success.

Governing is much tougher than being a revolutionary. It’s a lot easier to say “Arrest opponents,” “End H-1B visas,” “Defund Berkeley,” or “Just balance the budget with DOGE,” than to actually accomplish these things. Politics is not a one-and-done activity; it’s an endless battle in which the GOP inches toward victories. The swamp is not stupid—they built a system to maintain power for decades.

As MAGA and America First transition from revolutionaries to governing, they will confront the same realities around CRs, legal limits, and long-term strategy. Burning the system down will not happen—it is incompetence. The goal is to overtake the system and transition the Swamp from serving the Uniparty to serving America First. You may disagree, but those who refuse to take power will always lose to those who don’t. The Swamp describes a system of DC individuals working to benefit their ideology. We need our own swamp,one that blocks out those who cannot see the moment. It is the natural conclusion if you want to win.