Donald Trump has ordered Senate Republicans to fire the parliamentarian, Elizabeth McDonough, over her objections to his $1 billion ICE and Border Patrol bill. Trump unleashed his demand in a lengthy Truth Social post Wednesday, accusing McDonough of bias in favor of Democrats after she ruled funding for Trump's ballroom could not be included in a reconciliation bill.
'Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats — So why has she not been replaced? There are many fair people who would be qualified for that vital job,' he wrote. The President accused her of being under the 'iron fist' of late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whom Trump referred to as a 'vicious lunatic.'
'Republicans play a very soft game compared to the Dumocrats,' he wrote, using his new nickname for the opposition party. 'It is their single biggest disadvantage in politics. The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us,' he added.
He promised that there would never be another Republican president again if they didn't pass his favored Save America Act, adding that the Democrats would grant DC and Puerto Rico statehood. 'The Republicans aren't doing it because they say the Dumocrats will never do it, but the Republicans are WRONG. Get smart and tough Republicans, or you'll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!'
The parliamentarian is more often than not an afterthought, typically because their role is to be the Senate's hall monitor, essentially making sure mundane processes on the floor are adhered to. However, the parliamentarian is thrust into the spotlight every time senators try to pass a bill through budget reconciliation, a process that allows the Senate to pass items with a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster.
The appeal of the reconciliation process is obvious. Since Republicans control 53 seats in the Senate, a united GOP can essentially pass the bill without input from a single Democratic senator. The catch is, MacDonough can pick and choose which line items in the bill need to be slashed with red ink. She will be responsible for interpreting whether the bill complies with something called the Byrd Rule, which has been around since 1985.
The Byrd Rule is named after the late Sen. Robert Byrd, who was a key figure in instituting the guardrails around reconciliation packages like the one Trump is trying to ram through. The most important facet of the Byrd Rule states that reconciliation bills cannot have provisions in them that don't have an effect on the budget. Put simply, if a provision doesn't meaningfully increase or decrease federal spending, it can be considered extraneous and be tossed out of the bill. The Byrd Rule also prohibits reconciliation bills from overhauling Social Security or increasing the deficit for a fiscal year not included in the bill's purview.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune called the comments 'concerning' and unnecessary, since many of the issues in the bill have the votes to pass. The test to see whether a bill complies with the rule has been referred to as the 'Byrd Bath.' MacDonough last used the 'Byrd Bath' to water down President Joe Biden's Build Back Better package in 2022. Specifically, she struck down three separate attempts by the Democrats to provide a pathway to citizenship for eight million immigrants living in the United States illegally.
Now, she's in the position to take a major bite out of Trump's agenda, though it's not entirely clear what she might take aim at. Pressured by the White House, Republicans have tried to add the money to a roughly $70 billion bill to restore funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. But the security proposal has met with backlash from some GOP lawmakers who are questioning the cost and the lack of detail from the White House and U.S. Secret Service about how the taxpayer dollars would be used.
Left in the bill is the money for ICE and Border Patrol, which Democrats have blocked for months in protest of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement crackdown. Democrats demanded reforms for the agencies, but negotiations with the White House yielded little progress. So Republicans are using the complicated budget maneuver called reconciliation — the same process that allowed them to pass Trump's tax and spending cuts bill last year — to fund the agencies through the end of Trump's term with a simple majority and no Democratic votes.
Still, passage requires signoff from the parliamentarian, and unity from Republicans. 'We're working on it,' Thune said as he left the Capitol on Wednesday evening. There is precedent for the Senate simply ignoring the parliamentarian. The declarations of MacDonough and all the other parliamentarians before her have been non-binding and lacking in actual enforcement power. Going back a bit further, there is also precedent of Senate leaders getting rid of the parliamentarian over disagreements on the Byrd Rule. On May 7, 2001, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., fired the parliamentarian at the time, Robert Dove, because he was getting in the way of President George W Bush's budget bill. Exactly one month later, with a new parliamentarian in place, Bush was able to sign his first landmark tax cut into law.
