Senate Parliamentarian Deals Setback To Dems’ Hope To Circumvent the Filibuster

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has dealt Democrats a potential setback in their legislative agenda after she ruled that just one more automatic budget reconciliation is allowed this year.

That process allows Democrats to circumvent the filibuster, which essentially creates a 60 vote threshold for most legislation. Democrats were hoping to use the process known as budget reconciliation to pass legislation with a simple majority or just 51 votes.

However, before senators can vote on a reconciliation bill, it has to be discharged from the Senate Budget Committee.

As The Hill reports, “MacDonough ruled that a revision to the 2021 budget resolution cannot be automatically discharged from the Senate Budget Committee, meaning Democrats would need at least one Republican on the 11-11 panel to vote with them.”

The reconciliation measure would also have to have floor amendment votes. Additionally, MacDonough said that there would have to be an economic reason for using reconciliation again.

That means it is unlikely that Democrats would be able to use reconciliation more than once per year until after the midterm elections if they pick up more seats in the Senate and they have a majority on the Budget Committee to approve using budget reconciliation multiple times.

CNN’s Manu Raju noted that Democrats were, in practice, not likely to use budget reconciliation again before the fall as lawmakers are still negotiating Biden’s infrastructure bill.

Democrats already used the automatic budget reconciliation process once this year to pass Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.