The obscure Senate functionary whose word is law

SENATORS, ALAS, are not much like nuns. But the Senate itself bears a certain resemblance to a convent, with its hushed halls, arcane rituals and air of separation from real life. Above all, it has a Mother Superior, who is a stickler for the rules. She is immune to criticism and flattery. Her work is dull and thankless. In theory she answers to a higher power. In practice she is almighty. She is the Senate parliamentarian.

Elizabeth MacDonough has held the office since 2012. Her job is to interpret the Senate’s rules in a scrupulously non-partisan manner. Yet in recent days Republican senators have said some uncharitable things about her, including that she is a woke, radical leftist who should be fired. The president himself told them to ignore her. Some want to limit her tenure. Through it all Ms MacDonough has stayed characteristically mum. She does not talk to reporters and she does not talk back to senators.

Republicans were angry that Ms MacDonough vetoed elements of Donald Trump’s big, beautiful bill, including certain Medicaid cuts and a measure allowing the sale of federal land. Some had to be excised completely and others rewritten before the Senate could pass its version of the bill on July 1st. Her judgments are not enforceable but they almost always hold. Her predecessor called the office a “silent killer”.

To win the Senate’s nod, most bills need 60 votes—the number required to end a filibuster. But a budget bill can proceed with only 51 votes in a process called “reconciliation”. To prevent unscrupulous senators from sneaking all their legislative desires into budget bills, the parliamentarian decides what counts as fiscal using a test called the Byrd rule.

Non-fiscal policies can have big budgetary impacts. In such cases the parliamentarian weighs the nature of the policy against the nature of its effects. This is called a Byrd bath. Whatever she rejects becomes a Byrd dropping.

Sometimes senators do not solicit her opinion, for fear of what she will say. Republicans refused to ask Ms MacDonough about their plan to wipe trillions off the cost of the big beautiful bill by adopting a different definition of the baseline level of spending than had previously been used. They simply waved their wand.

Democrats have been frustrated by Ms MacDonough at times, too. In 2021 she ruled that they could not give legal status to millions of unauthorised immigrants. That same year she rejected their bid to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Like the Republicans this time, Democrats made a fuss but ultimately acquiesced.

Senators comply out of self-interest, which takes two forms, says Jonathan Gould, a law professor at New York University. One is risk-aversion. They worry that ditching a constraint while in the majority will bite them next time they are in the minority. The other is that adverse rulings by the parliamentarian can help avoid intraparty spats, by allowing some members to promote controversial measures while permitting others to escape voting on them.

The office has existed for nearly a century, but it has become much more influential and controversial in recent years owing to intensifying partisanship. Since mustering 60 votes is nearly impossible these days, more and more happens through reconciliation, including all the big laws of the past decade: the tax cuts of Mr Trump’s first term, the pandemic stimulus and Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. It is an unholy state of affairs.■