Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has taken a chainsaw to the Republican reconciliation package, removing key provisions that would reduce Medicaid funding for illegal immigrants and so-called "gender-affirming care." She further struck down attempts to defund sanctuary cities, among other GOP priorities in the bill.
Those cuts were not only the ideological driving force behind reconciliation, but they were also a significant part of trying to make the budget math work regarding future deficits. MacDonough was appointed by now-deceased Democrat Harry Reid in 2012 during his time as Senate Majority Leader. That's justifiably leading to questions about her impartiality or lack thereof.
These latest "revisions" by MacDonough come on the heels of several she made earlier in the week that also weakened the bill, including stopping cuts to electric vehicle mandates and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Current Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) quickly came out and knocked down any notion that he might fire MacDonough, claiming that doing so would put the reconciliation package in peril.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) on Thursday said he will not overrule the parliamentarian after she rejected key Medicaid provisions in the GOP’s tax and spending megabill, dealing a blow to Republicans’ plan to pay for tax cuts in the package.
“No. That would not be a good outcome for getting a bill done,” Thune told reporters at the Capitol.
Here's my issue with this. If almost everything good about the bill gets stripped out, then who cares if it doesn't get done in its current form? At that point, you might as well just put the tax cut extension forward by itself and call it a day. The entire point of compromising on bad policies like increasing the SALT cap, which is just a giveaway to heavily blue states, was getting these necessary cuts in return. They were the entire fiscal justification for the reconciliation package. Without them, all you have is another terrible omnibus monstrosity that does little good and a lot of bad.
Is MacDonough acting like a partisan operative of the Democratic Party by doing this? It sure seems like it, given that the entire point of reconciliation is the ability to change the tax code and make cuts to non-discretionary spending. Of course, this fits right in with the idea that Republicans can win elections, but they still don't get to govern. That's been a running theme throughout President Donald Trump's second term, as the courts and now the Senate parliamentarian seem to believe the GOP must play by different rules than when Democrats are in power.
As to the idea that MacDonough can't be fired because it would break some norm, that's not true either. Senate Parliamentarians have been fired over disagreements before, most recently in 2001. Besides, does anyone really think Democrats wouldn't have fired MacDonough during past terms had she not been a rubber stamp for the party that appointed her?
What's the path forward here? Given Thune doesn't seem to have the backbone to take decisive action, the only option is to rewrite these provisions with different language in hopes of pressuring MacDonough to back down. How successful that will be, and how much she's relying on correctable technicalities to make her rulings is an open question.
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