Tag Archives: Senate Parliamentarian

Trying To Get The SAVE Act Passed

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If you weren’t already convinced that America needs the SAVE Act to insure honest elections, watching the elections in California should convince you. However, John Thune seems to be having a lot of difficulty getting the SAVE Act passed. I am not sure how much of that difficulty he is actually creating.

On Tuesday (updated Wednesday), Just the News posted an article about a suggestion by Senator Marsha Blackburn on how to breakup the logjam.

The article reports:

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., is reviving an idea to end the current Senate parliamentarian’s blockade on the Save America Act election integrity law: enact a term limit for the position.

Blackburn told Just the News on Tuesday her legislation from a year ago to set term limits for the parliamentarian was gaining renewed steam as the GOP voter base stews over the chamber’s inability to pass President Donald Trump’s signature election law, imposing voter ID in citizenship checks.

“Now, when it comes to the parliamentarian, last year you had Senators Tuberville, Marshall, and I who filed a bill that called for term limits on the parliamentarian. And this is a discussion that has popped back up because of some of the decisions of the parliamentarian,” Blackburn told the Just the News, No Noise television show.

“I think it’s appropriate to term limit the parliamentarian,” she added. “You know, you have different positions, different assigned, and different offices that are term limited, whether it’s serving as on the Fed, or whether it’s serving on certain commissions, or in certain appointments, and we think it’s appropriate that the parliamentarian be someone that is term limited also.”

As Trump has pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, Blackburn said more senators have rallied around the idea of her legislation.

The SAVE Act is supported by over 80 percent of Americans (including Democrats and unaffiliated voters). If the Senate does not represent the voters, who does the Senate represent?

When Your Power Grab Gets Slowed

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Yesterday National Review posted an article about a recent ruling by the Senate parliamentarian that will put a crimp in the plans of Democrats to use the reconciliation process to pass their radical agenda without Republican support.

The article reports:

The Senate parliamentarian issued a new ruling that would effectively allow Democrats to use automatic budget reconciliation just one more time this year to bypass Republicans to advance President Biden’s progressive agenda. 

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that a revision to the 2021 budget resolution cannot be automatically discharged from the Senate Budget Committee, according to The Hill. This means that Democrats would need at least one Republican on the 11-11 panel to vote with them if they want to use reconciliation on more than one occasion before the legislative session ends in October.

The bi-partisan talk during the presidential campaign was simply talk. There never was any plan to work with Republicans unless the Republicans agreed to everything the Democrats wanted. To Democrats the definition of unity is “when everyone agrees with me.”

The article notes:

The ruling makes it more likely that Democrats will pursue a fresh fiscal 2022 budget to bypass Republicans if infrastructure negotiations fail, according to Bloomberg.

The news comes as Biden said on Tuesday that June “should be a month of action on Capitol Hill” and that while pundits on TV may ask why he has not done more to pass his legislative priorities that it is because he “only has a majority of effectively four votes in the house and a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” likely referring to Senators Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.).

During a press briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki attempted to rewrite Biden’s remarks, claiming that the president was only commenting on TV punditry.

“I can tell you that sometimes these conversations can be oversimplified. TV isn’t always made for complex conversations about policymaking,” she said. “What the president was simply conveying was that his threshold, his litmus test is not to see eye-to-eye on every single detail of every issue and he doesn’t with Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin.”

“He believes there’s an opportunity to work together to make progress to find areas of common ground even if you have areas of disagreement,” Psaki said.

However, Republicans have criticized Biden and his party for doing little to work with the GOP to find common ground. Democrats used budget reconciliation earlier this year to pass the president’s COVID-19 response package with a simple majority and without Republican support.

“He knows well having served 36 years in the Senate that sometimes it’s not a straight line to victory or success, sometimes it takes more time and he’s open to many paths forward,” she said. “I don’t think he was intending to convey anything more than a little bit of commentary on TV punditry.” 

Keep your eye on the filibuster. If the filibuster survives, we may get through the Biden administration without bankrupting the country.