The Senate Parliamentarian..
…says that the Democrats are barred from including in the spending bill a plan to give out 8 million green cards, because “the policy changes of this proposal far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation.”
But will the Democrats respond with the equivalent of, “How many divisions does the Senate Parliamentarian have?”
MacDonough decided the Byrd Rule applied, which “allows senators to block provisions of reconciliation bills that are ‘extraneous’ to reconciliation’s basic purpose of implementing budget changes.”
Ah, ha, ha. The former “Dean of the Senate” and former exalted cyclops of the KKK, created a rule that stops Democrats run amok from perverting the meaning of a reconciliation bill. Somehow I am not reassured that the the “running amok” will be stopped for long.
I predict they will ignore the ruling.
There also has to be a ruling on including the election “reforms”.
Congress has the power to allow more green cards if they would just do their work by passing an immigration bill. The current system, of encouraging undocumented people to walk across the border in dangerous, unlawful conditions, is lazy, embarrassing, and idiotic. Why are these people elected? They are not doing the work that their position is required to do.
“How many divisions does the Senate Parliamentarian have?” just like the Pope, who has moral power, we can hope that Manchin and Sinema will side with MacDonough just like they have so far resisted nuking the filibuster.
Psh. Rules are for Republicans.
How long until they fire this parliamentarian and hire a better one?
Or maybe they can appoint 4 more parliamentarians for balance.
I suspect this is Kabuki theater and is all for show. I suspect that they have no intention of doing this for real because the current illegal status of the 8 million is far more useful politically and financially.
Most democrats favor whatever path leads to illegals gaining the ‘right’ to vote. Some democrats favor simply manufacturing however many ‘votes’ are needed to ‘win’.
But whatever the means favored, they’re all united in the belief that they ‘deserve’ to win… permanently.
A remarkably unaware desire, any party that rejects fact based, logical criticism is a party whose days are numbered.
Liberals in the last several generations have tended to understand ‘fair procedures’ as ‘whatever gives us what we want’. Tended. What that has meant is that there has been a progressive contraction of the realm in which actually fair procedures and extant rules operate.
1. The first thing to go was inconvenient constitutional language. Understanding that Congress has only delegated powers and that ‘implied powers’ and ‘inherent powers’ refer to the construction of conduits to the exercise of expressly delegated powers was an obstacle to New Deal wishlists, so their lickspittles in the appellate judiciary simply erased the distinction in law between interstate and intrastate commerce and allowed for creative (as in creative accounting) interpretation of other vague clauses. This was accomplished between 1936 and 1943, with the Wickard decision emblematic.
2. The second thing to go was legislative discretion over matters wherein public opinion is an obstacle to the liberal wishlist (and public opinion incongruent with the prejudice of professional class types, the sort of lawyer you find in the appellate judiciary especially). This has been an ongoing project since 1953. Emblematic would be Roe v Wade, Romer v Evans, and Obergefell, though there are a score of others.
3. The third thing to go was a sense of the distinction between America and the World. We can date this to about 1992. It was around that time that a Democratic Party operative told Michael Lind that they’d given up on white wage earners and would be building an electoral base by importing hispanics from Mexico &c. The Democrats views on immigration have a number of sources, but this vote farm project is a crucial component. By the way, George W. Bush is a pig-headed ass on this subject.
4. The fourth thing to go was a general respect for the probity of balloting. Elections administration has always been done with the left hand in this country and there’s been a great deal of local fraud. In much of the South, blacks were kept off the rolls through various sorts of chicanery. Still, by 1970 or thereabouts, you could say that eligible people were not being kept off the rolls and elections were seldom disfigured by fraud. First you’ve had the inadvisable application of information technology, then you had the absurd explosion of convenience voting. This was wholly unnecessary as there were ready alternatives which would not compromise ballot security. A watershed arrived in 2004 when Democratic Party operatives stole the Governor’s chair in Washington state by ‘finding’ uncounted ballots after the voting. Then they implement all-mail voting. Democratic voters pretend this is not a problem
5. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen Democrats progressively stripping away courtesies politicians commonly offered each other. We’ve never had definitive proof of the degree to which Barack Obama was in the know about Deep State activities against the political opposition, but there is some suggestive information. It started with Lois Lerner at the IRS, Eric Holder’s staff at the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the DNI &c. In Donald Trump’s last year, the corruption of elements of the security state was manifest in the military high command.
6. Now you find it in Congress. There’s been a great deal of abuse of filibusters in recent decades and the practice is not a good one. Nevertheless, making use of razor thin majorities to attempt architectural changes in the political order (packing the courts, packing the Federal Election Commission, institutionalizing vote fraud in all elections) is stupefying.
7. Note, we have no reason to believe that our ever inventive courts (who profess to ‘find’ a ‘constitutional right’ to engage in homosexual pseudogamy) will be an obstacle to any of this and you’d be hard put to find a federal trial judge in Washington who is not implicated in the holding of political prisoners. (That on top of local judiciaries treating Antifa and other elements of the Democratic Party’s electoral base with kid gloves).
Note, ever procedural safeguard has been demolished and street-level Democrats simply pretend it isn’t happening. We have an enormous problem in that you cannot share a country with people whose modus operandi does not permit of a consensual understanding of who is a citizen and who is not and a consensual understanding of the procedures to be followed in making collective decisions and adjudicating disputes.
It’s a personal problem for me in that among the street-level Democrats who support the abuses would be my two surviving siblings.
Perhaps they’ll all ‘cane’ one another. There is a precedent!
The Left will mobilize their army of lawyers to assert that the Parliamentarian misused the rule and Schumer will disregard the ruling.
Everyone knows the answer, neatly detailed here by fellow commenters. I suspect the Dems will do the simplest thing: ignore the Parliamentarian and dare others to fight. Said fight, if it is undertaken, will amount to public statements of concern and outrage from folks like Senators Graham, Romney, Collins, etc., which is to say there will be no fight of substance.
They will ignore knowing, like with Obamacare and so many other “laws,” that once passed and signed it will take years to even undo a piece of it if ever.
Well the Pope had ZERO divisions, and the people of Eastern Europe found out quickly that there was not much difference – if any – living under the tyrannical rule of “Uncle” Joe Stalin (FDR’s moniker for his good pal , and Henry Wallace’s really really good pal, who exterminated more people than did Hitler) or under a Hitler.
Tangential to this, the post WWll division of Europe provided a good test of capitalism vs communism, specifically looking at E vs W Germany. Both nations having a common culture, language, ethnicity, etc.
It was clear by 1960 – if not sooner – which form of govt. provided superior results for the average citizen. It was also clear that the ruling denizens of the left really could not care less about the ordinary citizen.
Of course, all of this is meaningless for the demokrats here in the USA (and about half of the voters) as they inexorably move the USA closer and closer to an E.Germany or Cuba or former USSR.
If the demonkrats cannot legislate using methods delineated in the Constitution, they will just do an end-around that pesky, “anti-government” piece of toilet paper written by white-privileged, slave owning, misogynist, imperialist pigs.
I guess the demonkrats believe that “real” communism has never been tried and/or if only they were in charge, the Utopian fantasy they envision will come to pass (with them in charge, of course).
I am still awaiting any sort of real reaction by the Republicans to what is occurring in our country.
No wonder Trump called several Republicans morons , dumb and losers. Frankly, the republicans do not even rise to the level of losers or morons and the adjectives /adverbs (don’t know which; grammar was never my strong suit) that should be applied to them even Trump would not utter.
But Trump lost many voters due to his choice of words (and his in your face attitude), yet the real world results of a politician’s policies apparently do not play a role in many a voter’s decisions.
For the umpteenth time; the greatest danger in a representative democracy is the voters – freely and willingly – voting for a national suicide.
Joe Stalin (FDR’s moniker for his good pal , and Henry Wallace’s really really good pal, who exterminated more people than did Hitler) or under a Hitler.
The satellite countries had governments which were grotesquely abusive. I don’t think any of them generated death tolls on the order of those of the Stalin regime (in terms of proportions) or those of Nazi occupation governments either. North of 1/4 of Poland’s pre-war population died during the war. Nothing like that happened in post-war Poland.
Post-War Poland had very few if any Jews left to kill, Art Deco.
Post-War Poland had very few if any Jews left to kill, Art Deco.
?
About 15% of the gentile population died during the war in Poland. The overwhelming majority of Stalin’s victims were gentiles. No clue why you fancy eastern Europe’s Communist regimes would only be motivated to abuse the Jewish population.
Art Deco:
I don’t read alanc709’s mind, but my interpretation of his comment was not that it was about Stalin targeting Jews (although, to a certain extent, he did persecute them – at least, he did to a certain degree and there is evidence that he planned more right before he died). It was about the fact that in Poland – which suffered greatly during the war, and that very much included the non-Jewish Poles – the bulk of that 1/4 of the population who died were Jews.
As I said, Poles suffered greatly, and certainly not just the Jews. It’s hard to estimate war deaths and to differentiate between the numbers under the Nazis vs. the numbers under Stalin. Here are some numbers:
So well over half of the Polish dead were Jews, most of them killed because they were Jewish. Poland’s prewar Jewish population was about 10%, and by the end of the war there were almost no Jews in Poland, and most of those Jews had been murdered. According to most of the statistics, about 60% of the Polish war dead were Jews. So Polish Jews were killed way disproportionately to their numbers.
When you write that “the overwhelming majority of Stalin’s victims were Gentiles” – well, yes. The real question, though, is whether Jews were disproportionately targeted. But Stalin, unlike Hitler, certainly did not perpetrate a Holocaust in which he planned to exterminate all the Jews. His attitude and plans for the Jews before he died are subject to a lot of discussion and disagreement, with some saying he had mass deportation plans and others denying it. Also see this.
I don’t read alanc709’s mind,
The post-war Communist governments were cruel in a dozen different ways. They just weren’t slaughtering people in job lots of six, seven, or eight digits. Alanc709’s response was to point out there weren’t many Jews left in Poland in 1945, as if there weren’t ample populations of non-Jews to put to the sword (as in fact they were in Stalinist Russia and Nazi-occupied Poland). You’re lost on some tangent which assumes I’m making some point about comparative losses, which of course I am not.
Art Deco;
I’m not “lost on some tangent.” I’m not “lost” at all. I’m merely pointing out that a very disproportionate number of the Poles who were killed were actually Polish Jews who were killed because they were Jews rather than because they were Poles, and that the jury is out on whether Stalin was singling out Jews to a certain extent for persecution, or was planning to do so in a bigger way.
I was addressing you, but sometimes when I write a comment I’m also addressing people in general, just for informational purposes. That was true here, as well.
I did a Ctrl-F on the US Constitution and I found no mention of a Senate Parliamentarian.
I did find this: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings”.
So the Senate Parliamentarian can say this until the Senate overrides the rule which requires only a majority vote. They do this whenever they want–when it’s to confirm judges the press calls it “the nuclear option”. It’s been done by both parties.
So this statement is cover, plain and simple, for the Dems who don’t wish to anger their voters by not passing this. It’s the same service Sinema and Manchin (and John McCain when he was alive) provide but there’s a non-elected official they can point to when they throw up their hands and say “we tried”.