Senate ref holds power over Trump agenda

[corbe]

Senate ref holds power over Trump agenda

 By Alexander Bolton and Niv Elis - 05/09/17 06:00 AM EDT 

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough is the most powerful person in Washington few have heard of.

As the Senate’s chief procedural referee, she will decide how much of President Trump’s agenda can pass without any Democratic votes.

GOP leaders plan to pass legislation reforming the nation’s healthcare system and overhauling the tax code through special “budget ­reconciliation” rules that would prevent a Democratic filibuster.

Republican senators are also looking at scrapping pieces of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act through the use of the same rules.

Their success may largely come down to MacDonough.

“The parliamentarian makes the calls,” said former Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who worked with MacDonough in 2010 when Democrats passed a major revision to the Affordable Care Act with a simple majority.

“She’s able to say what can be voted on with a simple majority versus what requires a supermajority, so this gives the parliamentarian extraordinary influence on the outcome,” Conrad said.

Because they can avoid the filibuster, the budget rules are powerful. But there are major restrictions on their use because of a six-part test in the Senate known as the Byrd Rule, after the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.).

Democrats plan to challenge the GOP by asking MacDonough to make decisions on the most subjective part of the Byrd Rule: whether the budgetary impact of a provision passed under reconciliation is “merely incidental” to its nonbudgetary impact.

If MacDonough rules that a part of a GOP bill has a merely incidental budgetary impact, it would have to be removed from the legislation.

Parts of the ObamaCare bill approved by the House, for example, will almost certainly be ruled out of bounds, senators in both parties have acknowledged.

This could force Republicans to strip out large portions of the House bill, including provisions central to its passage last week. And that could make it harder for the GOP to get a final bill to Trump’s desk.

MacDonough took over as Senate parliamentarian, becoming the first woman to do so, in February 2012, when Democrats controlled the Senate under Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). She was promoted by Secretary of the Senate Nancy Erickson but never talked to Reid about the job.

Hired as an assistant parliamentarian in 1999, when Republicans controlled the chamber, MacDonough served as senior assistant parliamentarian from 2002 to 2012.

She grew up in Maryland before moving to Connecticut at age 13 and later graduated from George Washington University in 1988. She started her career in on Capitol Hill in 1990 as a Senate library aide, later working in the executive clerk’s office and as an assistant editor for the Congressional Record.

She attended Vermont Law School, and after graduating in 1998, worked briefly as an assistant district counsel for the Department of Justice in Newark, N.J., handling immigration cases.

She is respected by Senate Democrats and Republicans alike.

Don Stewart, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) deputy chief of staff, praised MacDonough as “a brilliant lawyer, a thorough and fair referee, and a walking encyclopedia of Senate precedent and procedure.

“The Senate is fortunate to have her guidance and advice,” he said.

That respect may be tested in the coming months.

The parliamentarian is supposed to stay above the fray of politics in order to give clear-cut decisions on Senate rules.

But some conservatives have tried to raise questions about MacDonough’s impartiality.

Philip Wegmann, a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner, wrote in March that MacDonough’s “politics are a bit questionable,” asserting that she advised former Vice President Al Gore in his legal battle with George W. Bush after the 2000 presidential election. He cited a profile published by Vermont Law School, where she received her degree.

MacDonough, however, never played a partisan role after the 2000 election. Instead, she had advised Gore in his capacity at the time as the ex officio president of the Senate during a joint session of Congress while it counted electoral ballots from the 2000 election.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has reminded colleagues that the parliamentarian only advises the presiding chair on the Senate’s precedent and the presiding chair can disregard that advice in ruling on a pending question — though this view hasn’t gained any traction within the Senate Republican Conference.

Cruz argued in The Wall Street Journal in March that a full repeal of ­ObamaCare and its mandates should be possible with a simple majority because “the Senate parliamentarian does not ultimately determine what is allowable under reconciliation.”

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http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/332465-senate-ref-holds-power-over-trump-agenda

[kevindavis007]

I call it Checks and Balances..

[libertybele]

Great article.  I had never heard of her nor did I know we used a Senate Parliamentarian.