Pearl River         Who would have imagined that lower income families would ever find themselves thankful for parliamentary rules?  Not me, for sure!  Yet, somehow, miracles never cease, and we’re getting a break from the parliamentarian of the US Senate, as she goes through the budget reconciliation pretense that powers Trump and the Republican’s Big Beautiful Budget Bill.

At ACORN, our – or at least my – antipathy to Robert’s Rules of Order was so intense that it was barred from any claims of authority in membership and board members.  It’s not that such rules have no value, or that they might not be helpful in certain situations.  No, the issue was our interest in equalizing our members and leaders’ voices in meetings, particularly for those that didn’t have any organizational experiences or background in dealing with such rules.  We didn’t want to inadvertently empower some who might have had some acquaintance with such rules over the many who would have been clueless.  Additionally, we recoiled from any notion that an organizer might have become the de facto arbitrator of such disputes and by default gain a heavy hand in member and/or leader disagreements as a parliamentarian for which they also had no training or background.  We favored consensus and accommodation, rather than the umpire-like strike calling that might silence some voices based on their ignorance of certain procedures from entering or impacting the discussions.

In Congress, though, it turns out that a parliamentarian can be a buffer for sharp dealing on the rules. The whole notion of driving a truck filled to the brim with various policy and program initiatives by calling it a budget reconciliation is a dodgy move to avoid the weakness of a party’s majorities in the House and the Senate.  In recent years, control of either body has bounced back and forth on the thinnest of margins between the Republicans and the Democrats.  The reconciliation trick was pioneered in many ways by the Democrats, and now it’s the Republicans turn.  Both moves are designed to escape the specter of the filibuster, which by the rules of both houses can only be broken by a 60% majority, which neither party has had for some time, but which effectively would kill any bill unliked by that majority.

The House parliamentarian had ruled against some items as not being even remotely related to the budget, and therefore unreconcilable, but was ignored.  The current majority leader of the Senate in order to protect the potential of the filibuster went on the record that the Senate would abide by the parliamentarian’s objective and nonpartisan rulings.

She’s not finished her deliberations, but in a major move she declared the cutbacks in the food stamp program did not fit the reconciliation, because it simply pushed the costs to the states.  Many states in areas where huge numbers rely on food stamps had already been saying that there was no way they could pick up the difference.  She also blocked the efforts in the bill to deny nutritional aid to immigrants, to slash the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to zero, to block the ability for lawsuits to challenge and stop Trump executive orders, and to merge or shift various federal agencies to other departments.

Admittedly, this is a lot more than just claiming whether a motion is on the floor and been properly seconded, since both bodies have a lot of rules on what’s budgetary and what’s not.  These days we need help from any place we can find it, so for a minute let’s cheer for the parliamentarian for saving millions from starvation and more evil, thereby creating a somewhat safer port in this terrible storm.