In November 2015, congressional Republicans launched a pointless crusade to repeal the Affordable Care Act, indifferent to the fact that Barack Obama would inevitably veto their plan if it reached his desk. GOP lawmakers plowed forward anyway, using the budget reconciliation process that allowed them to circumvent the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
There were, however, procedural pitfalls. In order for a reconciliation bill to advance, it has to meet a series of stringent conditions, which Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough said the Republican bill failed to meet.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, in his first year on Capitol Hill, offered a straightforward solution to the party’s problem: GOP leaders should simply fire MacDonough and replace her with someone who would tell them what they wanted to hear.
That didn’t happen, though more than a decade later, Donald Trump is thinking along the same lines. NOTUS reported:
President Donald Trump pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian after she ruled Republicans could not include funding for the president’s ballroom in a budget bill, two sources familiar with the request told NOTUS.
The president called the South Dakota Republican on Monday to express his frustrations with the decision, according to a third source. The call between Trump and Thune was first reported by Semafor.
Those behind-the-scenes details were provocative, but they also burst out into the open on Wednesday morning when the president published a lengthy and furious rant to his social media platform, calling out MacDonough by name and adding, “Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats — So why has she not been replaced? … The Republicans play a very soft game compared to the Dumocrats. It is their single biggest disadvantage in politics. The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us.”
As part of the same tirade, Trump said Obama had hired MacDonough. Like the rest of his ridiculous rant, that isn’t true, though the president is not known to care about factual details.
There’s no great mystery as to what precipitated the harangue: The parliamentarian told Senate leaders this past weekend that funding provisions related to the White House ballroom would need to be changed to be included in a pending reconciliation bill.
But Trump doesn’t want to change the bill. He would rather change the parliamentarian.
At this point, there’s no reason to believe GOP Senate leaders will do as the president has directed. In fact, Senate Majority Leader John Thune called Trump’s online statement “concerning” and suggested he would provide MacDonough with additional security in the wake of Trump’s condemnation.
But the incident brought to mind Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last summer. When the president sees nonpartisan officials who offer answers the White House doesn’t like, he believes the solution is to oust them and find someone who will tell Trump what he wants to hear.
It’s an inherently authoritarian mindset, which Thune will hopefully continue to push back against.
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