Unelected official targets gun owners, private schools in latest rejection of Trump policies

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough continues to rummage through the Senate’s version of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful” bill and strike provisions that she has determined violate the upper chamber’s stringent budget rules.

MacDonough, an unelected official with outsized influence over the final shape of the president’s landmark tax and immigration bill, advised the Senate on Friday morning that provisions eliminating a tax on firearm suppressors and creating a $4 billion private school tax credit program will have to be revised or struck to pass the Senate plan by a simple majority vote. The parliamentarian’s rulings striking 52 sections from the initial draft bill thus far have infuriated conservative GOP lawmakers who have accused her of undermining Republican policy goals.

Congressional Republicans are using the so-called budget reconciliation process to pass the president’s bill. The fast-track procedure allows Senate Republicans to circumvent Democratic opposition by passing the budget legislation by a simple majority vote.

However, provisions that MacDonough determines violate the Senate’s budget rules would be subject to a 60-vote legislative threshold, effectively forcing GOP senators to get Democratic buy-in before those proposals can pass the upper chamber. MacDonough was appointed to her role in 2012 under the late former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

MacDonough ruled Friday that a $200 tax on firearm silencers violates budget rules requiring provisions to directly affect spending and revenue and have little to no impact on policy. Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus notably pushed for the silencer tax cut as part of the House-passed bill and the upper chamber kept the language in their proposal.

The Senate parliamentarian also determined that a new multi-billion dollar tax credit program seeking to fund private school scholarships does not comply with budget rules. Proponents of the pro-school choice measure touted the proposal as “revolution within the tax code” that would give millions of students across the country access to private and religious schools of their choosing.

MacDonough also dealt a blow to Senate Republicans’ efforts to shield certain religious educational institutions, such as Hillsdale College, from their proposal to hike the tax rate on the annual returns of university endowments. This would likely force Hillsdale, a small Christian liberal arts college favored by GOP lawmakers, to pay a higher endowment tax alongside universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Senate Republicans say they are working diligently to submit revised language to MacDonough for review regarding many sections of the bill that she has struck. MacDonough has notably signed off on at least one revised provision that she initially ruled against: a food aid cost-share proposal that is projected to save taxpayers roughly $40 billion over a decade.

The prospect that MacDonough could ultimately rule in favor of certain sections of the bill that she initially nixed has not stopped some GOP lawmakers from calling for her ouster.

“We do more for illegal immigrants than we do for Americans,” Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the first GOP senator to call for MacDonough’s firing, wrote in a statement on the social media platform X on Friday. “The question is … will the woke Senate Parliamentarian side with illegals or the American people???”

Tuberville’s post was referring to a series of healthcare related provisions restricting illegal immigrants’ access to Medicare and Medicaid that MacDonough ruled could not be included in the Senate plan Thursday.

Thune has thus far opposed calls to overrule or fire MacDonough as he looks to have the upper chamber vote on the Senate plan as early as Saturday.

“[T]hat would not be a good option for getting a bill done,” Thune told reporters Thursday.

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