(The Blaze)—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.
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.
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