The Senate parliamentarian was never meant to be in the spotlight — let alone an office with political influence. But as Republicans lurch toward a habit of using the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to fund key government agencies, they are increasingly putting the fate of the party’s biggest spending priorities in the hands of a nonpartisan Senate adviser. “Senate Majority Leader John Thune should immediately fire the Parliamentarian, who treats Republicans, and everything that they stand for, horribly!” President Donald Trump posted on Monday. During the Senate’s latest reconciliation package, Republicans pushed to provide multiyear funding for immigration enforcement in place of annual appropriations — allowing them to bypass opposition from Democrats, who were demanding guardrails for ICE and Border Patrol. Even before they cleared that current package in the House, leadership already had its eyes on another one, teasing “reconciliation 3.0.” That process has meant renewed attention on Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, whose role as the chamber's in-house rules referee requires her to offer guidance on what provisions in the bill satisfy what’s known as the “Byrd rule.” A few weeks ago, MacDonough advised that language providing $1 billion for Secret Service funding connected to a proposed White House ballroom would violate the Byrd rule, earning Trump’s ire. “We have every right to change her, and should do so, IMMEDIATELY!” Trump continued in his Monday post, complaining about similar guidance on the GOP’s signature voter ID proposal. In the House, it’s made her something of a political target. “The House has passed bills, which means the majority of the American people have been represented properly. Then, they go over to the Senate, and an unelected bureaucrat decides that they won't be taken up by the Senate,” said Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., in an interview. “She needs to be fired.” Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., put his thoughts in simpler terms in a post: “FIRE THE PARLIAMENTARIAN!” MacDonough has held the parliamentarian position since 2012, when she was appointed by Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. As the first female Senate parliamentarian, she has advised the chamber through critical moments over the past decade, including efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act as well as Trump’s first and second impeachment trials. Majority leaders from both parties have replaced the parliamentarian in the past, although it hasn’t happened since MacDonough was appointed. Starting in the 1980s, the position alternated between Robert Dove and Alan Frumin, although much of the changeover had to do with personal working relationships rather than partisanship. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., defended MacDonough on Monday, arguing she’s made decisions in favor of both Republicans and Democrats. “The parliamentarian rulings break both ways, and you know, we lose a few, we win a few,” he said. “It’s a very specific skill set, and you need somebody that is going to be a fair referee when it comes to this stuff.” The parliamentarian’s office declined to comment, saying it is their policy to not talk to the press. Abusing reconciliation? While MacDonough takes the heat, experts say the Senate parliamentarian was never meant to be in this position in the first place. Michael Thorning, director of the structural democracy project at Bipartisan Policy Center, said the position is meant to be advisory in nature. MacDonough offers guidance on precedent and rules, and senators can ignore her advice. She is essentially a congressional staffer who, through little fault of her own, is becoming more visible as lawmakers seek to land more of their priorities through reconciliation bills, which don’t need to clear the Senate’s usual 60-vote threshold to advance. “Some of that comes with a misunderstanding about what the parliamentarian can and can’t do,” Thorning said. “I don’t think we have any reason to think that they are partisan or biased in that advice, but that’s often not how it’s portrayed or misinterpreted in the public sphere.” The pressure on MacDonough will only get worse as Republicans look to pass more annual funding through the reconciliation process, which House appropriators caution against. “It’s a bad practice,” said House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla. “I’m disappointed the Senate can’t clean up its mess, and we’ve been driven to this again. I hold the Democrats in the Senate most responsible, but I don’t excuse the Republicans for letting them do it.” “I have respect for the processes as they have historically been used, but I’m worried about it,” Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman Mark Amodei, R-Nevada, said of reconciliation. Amodei said the package that cleared the House on Tuesday marks a “two-off” by congressional Republicans to use reconciliation for appropriations, when factoring in the 2025 reconciliation law that provided a $191 billion pot of extra funding for the Department of Homeland Security, including $75 billion for ICE. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California independent who conferences with Republicans, said Tuesday he opposed the multiyear immigration enforcement package because it uses “a strictly party-line process to provide funding in a way that has really not traditionally been done before” — and what it means for nonpartisan guardrails. “The parliamentarian has traditionally been a nonpartisan official who calls balls and strikes, who provides guardrails for the process, whose work is informed by decades of precedent, and so when you turn her role into some sort of political hot potato, then I think it can only be corrosive,” Kiley said. What’s more, the process also tips the power balance toward the Senate and away from the House, Thorning said. “If the House is more and more willing to go along with doing appropriations with reconciliation, that means the House will be more constrained than it already is by the Senate’s Byrd rule,” Thorning said. “It’s extending that into a whole other plane.” It especially takes power away from House appropriations cardinals, as subcommittee chairs are known, who take center stage in negotiating annual appropriations levels. “If more and more appropriations are being done through reconciliation, eventually we’ll just be asking, ‘Well, why do we even have appropriations committees at all?’” said Thorning. A scapegoat The rampant misunderstanding of the parliamentarian’s role has a lot to do with how senators themselves present it, said James Wallner, a former Senate staffer and fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. In the case of the Byrd rule, it can look from the outside like the parliamentarian “is just deciding left and right what the members can do,” Wallner said. In reality, the role has “no real power.” Senators “will play a victim and blame the parliamentarian for not allowing them to do things that they ostensibly say they want to do,” Wallner said. As senators on both sides of the aisle make fewer procedural decisions themselves and defer more to the parliamentarian, they’re able to use the position as a “scapegoat,” he said. “Advice is merely advice,” Wallner said. “If there’s something in the bill and the parliamentarian says, ‘This has to come out,’ senators still have to take it out. … the parliamentarian has zero power to do any of those things.” “It’s the senators pretending to be victims, and by extension, Trump,” he said. “In reality, they just don’t want to vote for the ballroom.” Each party has accused the other of such scapegoating tactics over the years. But if they want to, the majority can push through a reconciliation provision that would ordinarily violate the Byrd rule if the presiding officer ignores the parliamentarian and simply decides a provision does not violate the rules. Under the 1974 law that laid out the modern budget process, a successful appeal of the chair’s ruling on a budget point of order requires 60 votes. A few senators have proposed imposing term limits on the parliamentarian to curb what Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., recently called “unchecked power over major legislation.” But they haven’t seen action on a resolution introduced by Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., last year expressing the sense that parliamentarians shouldn’t serve beyond one six-year term. On the House side, some Republicans said they see through the Senate scapegoating — and had another suggestion of who was to blame if Trump can’t get his wish on the White House ballroom or voter ID. “They give us advice and we can ignore it,” Van Orden said. “It’s the fault of the Senate, by and large.” Savannah Behrmann and Aris Folley contributed to this report.
