The Republicans’ big reconciliation problem

Capitol Hill Republicans are in a bind. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is barreling toward a vote, and it keeps getting worse — this time, because of the Senate parliamentarian.

Representatives and senators alike are angry. The bill they were pushing forward was carefully crafted to win with slim majorities in both chambers, and now a lot of the commonsense cuts conservative members were excited for are gone. Here’s the problem, though: Nobody can do anything about it.

The mood on Capitol Hill is tense and unpredictable. At stake: funding for Trump’s border enforcement, immigration crackdown, tax cuts, and other key priorities.

Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has had a field day stripping important Republican provisions from the bill. Among them: a $6.4 billion cut that eliminated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; a $1.4 billion cut to Federal Reserve employees’ salaries; a $771 million cost-saving measure transferring the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's authority to the Securities and Exchange Commission; a move to reassert Senate supervision on the largest executive regulations; and a move to demand states that make habitual food stamp overpayments (average overpayments outnumber underpayments by a ratio of more than 6.5 to 1) pay a portion of the cost. That last measure, just one of many more cuts by the parliamentarian, was estimated to save $12.8 billion a year.

MacDonough has so much power because the only way you can avoid the filibuster and pass something like this bill through the Senate with a simple 51-vote majority is through the reconciliation process, meaning it must have a specific impact on the federal budget.

How does shaving billions of dollars off federal expenses not impact the budget? MacDonough explained that she stripped those provisions because they were more policy-focused than budgetary. Or, she looked into Republicans’ hearts and divined their secret intentions. Between MacDonough and the Democrats’ army of federal judges, there seems to be a lot of divining going around these days.

Republicans have ample reason to be furious. A lot of these measures were important to getting fiscal hawks on board with the bill, and now they’re gone.

Conservatives have complained loudly about where we find ourselves now, saying Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and his team didn’t argue their points well enough.

They’ve also pointed out that the parliamentarian, who was first appointed to her post by the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), is an employee of the Senate and not a constitutional office, serving as simply an adviser on the proper process. That means the chamber’s presiding officer, the vice president, can overrule her, as vice presidents have done as recently as 1975.

Reid himself ignored his hire in 2013 when he nuked the filibuster for federal judgeships — lowering the required votes to 51 — and opened the floodgates to the kind of activist confirmations the White House is currently grappling with.

Four years later, in 2017, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) followed suit, ignoring MacDonough’s protests to expand Reid’s “nuclear option” to include Supreme Court nominees.

In the end, neither Thune nor his more conservative colleagues made a persuasive case. Their arguments may have needed work, but the failure wasn’t theirs alone. Everyone shares the blame.

Calls to fire or overrule the Senate parliamentarian amount to little more than a shiny distraction. Politically, it’s a nonstarter. Republican senators like John Curtis of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Mitch McConnell won’t back blowing up the filibuster.

It’s not that no one tried. The parliamentarian rejected the provisions, and too many Senate Republicans refuse to use the nuclear option to push through this next test of filibuster limits.

That leaves Republicans with no real path forward — and no time to waste. Complaining doesn’t move votes. “You go to war with the Senate you have,” a White House official involved in the negotiations told the Beltway Brief.

The mood on Capitol Hill is tense and unpredictable. At stake: funding for Trump’s border enforcement, immigration crackdown, tax cuts, and other key priorities.

Some Republicans want to scrap the deal and start over. But everyone knows that’s not a real option. The clock keeps ticking. And with each passing day, the odds of success shrink.

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