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What's This Garbage? The Senate Parliamentarian Just Took a Hatchet to Trump's Big Beautiful Bill

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  June 23, 2025 3:45 PM

Things were rocky with President Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill.’ The reconciliation package led to misdirected hostility between Trump and Elon Musk and whining from some annoying deficit hawks on the GOP side who don’t seem to get it. It got through the House. Now, in the Senate, the package, which makes the Trump tax cuts permanent, fully funds all of Trump’s immigration enforcement initiatives, and reforms social welfare, has taken a major blow from Democrat-appointed Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. 

She’s a leech from the corpse of Harry Reid, and she just sucked the life out of the bill by applying the Byrd rule to most of the key provisions, meaning 60 votes are required for passages instead of a simple majority. The bill is in serious danger right now, and it seems once again an unelected Democrat is acting with regal animus (via Time): 

She wasn’t elected and she doesn’t cast votes. But over the past week, Elizabeth MacDonough, the quietly powerful Senate parliamentarian, may have had more influence over Donald Trump’s legislative agenda than anyone else in Washington. 

After meeting with Republicans and Democrats behind closed doors, MacDonough in recent days has significantly shrunk the size of the President’s sweeping tax-and-spending package known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by striking several measures that violated an arcane, decades-old Senate rule known as the Byrd Rule, which prohibits provisions considered “extraneous” to the federal budget in the kind of legislation Republicans are trying to craft. 

One of the main GOP provisions the parliamentarian said did not satisfy the Byrd Rule was a measure to push some of the costs of federal food aid onto states, sending Republicans back to the drawing board to find the billions in savings that provision would have yielded. MacDonough also rejected measures to bar non-citizens from receiving SNAP benefits and one that would have made it more difficult to enforce contempt findings against the Trump Administration. MacDonough could issue additional guidance this week. 

The spate of rulings from the Senate parliamentarian, an official appointed by the chamber’s leaders to enforce its rules and precedents, has significantly complicated the prospects of passing Trump’s tax and spending bill by the July 4 deadline he imposed on Congress. Republicans have been scrambling for months to secure enough votes for Trump’s megabill, which centers on extending his 2017 tax cuts and delivering on several of his campaign promises, such as boosting border security spending and eliminating taxes on tips. Support for the package has softened this month as more Republicans warn that it would add trillions of dollars to the deficit without further spending cuts. 

But the parliamentarian’s latest rulings will force Republicans to either strip those provisions from the bill or secure a 60-vote supermajority to keep them in, a nearly impossible hurdle given that Senate Republicans only hold 53 seats. MacDonough ruled that some of the provisions have little business in a budget reconciliation bill, which can make big changes to how the federal government spends money but, under Senate rules, isn’t allowed to substantively change policy.  

[…] 

The Byrd Rule, adopted in 1985, is a procedural constraint named after the late Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia to prohibit “extraneous” provisions from being tacked onto reconciliation bills, which are fast-tracked budget packages that allow legislation to pass with a simple majority, bypassing the 60-vote filibuster threshold.

First, we had district judges, and now the foxes on the Senate floor are misapplying Senate procedure to block Trump’s agenda. You know what’s happening—I don’t need to tell you. With every illiberal move here, Democrats are making an ironclad case for why maybe we shouldn’t even have a godforsaken Congress. 

This fight isn't over, but we've sustained a massive blow here.