The Woman Behind the Curtain: Why Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough Must Go

An Obama-era, Harry Reid Appointee Is Obstructing Trump's Agenda. Fire Her.

Three days ago, the President of the United States publicly demanded the firing of a woman most Americans have never heard of. Donald Trump went after Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she ruled that $1 billion in security funding for the White House, including provisions to protect the East Wing expansion under construction, could not be included in the GOP’s $72 billion immigration enforcement reconciliation package. MacDonough concluded that the security money was insufficiently budgetary to satisfy the Byrd Rule and therefore could not bypass the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Senate Republicans were forced back to the drawing board to rework the package, with the President’s personal protection detail caught in the procedural crossfire. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, when asked whether he would replace MacDonough, declined. He has stuck to that position through three days of mounting pressure from the White House, conservative members of his own conference, and a House Republican delegation now openly calling on Vice President JD Vance to overrule her from the chair. The question is no longer hypothetical. The question is whether the Republican Senate majority intends to remain a Republican Senate majority in any practical sense, or whether it intends to keep paying an Obama-era staff lawyer $216,591.63 a year to edit the agenda the American people elected Donald Trump to deliver.

Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough with President Obama.

Consider what is being asked of the conservative voter. You are told that 77 million Americans cast ballots for a candidate who promised to secure the border, restrain federal spending, defund Planned Parenthood, reform the welfare state, and make the 2017 tax cuts permanent. You are told that the Republican Party then won the Senate, won the House, and won the White House on the strength of that mandate. You are then told that one woman, hand-picked by Harry Reid in February 2012 during the Obama administration and now serving in her 14th year on the job, has personally struck or forced the revision of more than 75 distinct provisions of Republican legislation across both Trump terms. The cumulative fiscal value of what she has gutted, on Medicaid alone, exceeds $500 billion. She blocked the cap on state Medicaid provider taxes. She blocked the prohibition on federal funding of gender transitions for minors. She blocked the REINS Act. She blocked the defunding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She blocked the deregulation of suppressors. She blocked the expansion of school vouchers. She blocked, twice, the defunding of Planned Parenthood. And now she has blocked $1 billion in security funding for the President of the United States himself. The reader who finds this account incredible is invited to verify it. Each ruling is on the public record.

A puzzled reader might pause here to ask what, exactly, the Byrd Rule is and why it has become the weapon of choice for blocking the Republican agenda. The answer is worth understanding. The Byrd Rule was adopted by the Senate in October 1985 as Amendment 878 to the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, sponsored by Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, and made permanent in 1990 as Section 313 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, now codified at 2 U.S.C. § 644. Its purpose was modest in 1985 and remains so on paper. Senator Byrd was worried that the still-young reconciliation process, designed to be a narrow fiscal tool that could pass with a simple majority, was being abused by senators of both parties to smuggle non-budgetary policy changes through the chamber on a filibuster-proof vehicle. The rule he wrote permits any senator to raise a point of order against any provision in a reconciliation bill the senator believes is “extraneous,” a term Byrd defined to include six categories, the most important of which is that the provision must produce a budgetary effect that is more than “merely incidental” to its non-budgetary policy purpose. If the chair sustains the point of order, the offending provision is “deemed stricken.” The only way to keep it in the bill is to waive the rule, which requires 60 votes, the same supermajority a normal filibuster would require. That is why MacDonough is powerful. The Byrd Rule converts every contested provision into a question of whether the policy effect of the provision is “merely incidental” to its budgetary effect, and that is exactly the kind of subjective interpretive judgment the Senate has gradually outsourced to the parliamentarian’s office. Three crucial facts follow. First, the Byrd Rule is a Senate rule, not a constitutional command. The Senate that wrote it in 1985 can rewrite it in 2026 by a simple majority vote. Second, the rule does not give the parliamentarian power. It gives the chair power, and the parliamentarian only advises. Third, the “merely incidental” test is so elastic that almost any conservative policy with a fiscal price tag can be ruled extraneous by a parliamentarian inclined to do so. Defunding Planned Parenthood saves money, but the parliamentarian decided in 2017 and again in 2025 that the policy effect was the point and the budget effect was incidental. Capping state Medicaid provider taxes saves $500 billion, but the policy effect of shifting the federal-state Medicaid balance is, again, what counts in the parliamentarian’s judgment. The rule is not neutral mathematics. It is a discretionary judgment exercised by an unelected staff lawyer.

That brings us to the deeper question: if her rulings are so consequential, surely the Constitution must require her? It does not. Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution states, in full, that “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.” The text contains no parliamentarian. No Byrd Rule. No reconciliation process. No Office of the Secretary of the Senate. The Senate operated for 146 years, from 1789 until 1935, without a formal parliamentarian of any kind. The Republic survived the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the ratification of the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Amendments, and most of the New Deal without one. The position was created in 1935 by Senate fiat, as a creature of the same administrative-state ethos that gave us the alphabet agencies. It is barely 90 years old. What one Senate created, another Senate may unmake by simple majority vote.

A second puzzled reader might object: but surely her rulings are binding? They are not. This is the single most important fact in the entire debate, and it is the fact most often obscured by political reporting that treats MacDonough as if she were a federal judge. She is not a judge. She is a staff lawyer. The R Street Institute, in a sober 2022 analysis, put the point plainly: “The Senate’s parliamentarian does not have power to decide what senators can do. But senators effectively give the parliamentarian that power when they defer to her.” Even the People’s Policy Project, a progressive policy shop writing during the 2021 Biden minimum-wage fight, conceded that “the section of the Congressional Budget Act that governs this part of the reconciliation process never mentions the parliamentarian. Instead, it states quite clearly that, when a senator raises a point of order that a provision contains extraneous matter, the Presiding Officer may sustain or overrule the point of order.” The presiding officer rules. The parliamentarian advises. Everything else is custom.

That custom has been broken repeatedly, by both parties, whenever the majority has had the will to break it. In 1949, Vice President Alben Barkley disregarded the parliamentarian on cloture. In 1967 and 1969, Vice President Hubert Humphrey did the same. In 1975, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, presiding over the Senate, simply ignored Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick’s advice on filibuster reform and ruled in favor of the majority’s preferred procedure. In May 2001, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, frustrated by Parliamentarian Robert Dove’s Byrd Rule rulings against George W. Bush’s tax-cut strategy, fired him outright and replaced him with Alan Frumin. In November 2013, Harry Reid executed the nuclear option, appealing the chair’s ruling to the full Senate and establishing by a 52 to 48 vote that 51 senators, not 60, were sufficient to end debate on most nominations. In April 2017, Mitch McConnell extended the same maneuver to Supreme Court nominations and confirmed Neil Gorsuch days later. And on May 22, 2025, the current Republican Senate majority voted to overrule MacDonough’s own ruling on the Congressional Review Act and the California EPA vehicle emissions waivers. The mechanism exists. The Republican Senate just used it. It can be used again.

Which raises the question of John Thune. The Senate Majority Leader has been asked repeatedly, by the President, by Senator Tommy Tuberville, by Senator Rand Paul, and by a growing chorus of House conservatives, whether he will replace MacDonough or overrule her. He has refused. His stated reason is striking. Thune argues that Republicans should preserve the parliamentarian as an institutional check, because Democrats may someday hold the chamber again and the same check will then constrain them. There are two problems with this argument. The first is that it concedes the conservative critique entirely. Thune is admitting that the parliamentarian is a political instrument whose value depends on which side is using it, not a neutral arbiter whose authority flows from the Constitution. The second problem is empirical. The instrument does not cut evenly. Across MacDonough’s 14-year tenure, her rulings against Democratic priorities have been rare and high-profile, the $15 minimum wage in 2021, the pathway to citizenship in Build Back Better, a handful of climate-related immigration provisions. Her rulings against Republican priorities now run to more than 75 distinct provisions, with a fiscal impact in the hundreds of billions of dollars, across two Trump administrations. The ratio is not subtle. Republicans are not preserving a neutral umpire. They are paying more than any single senator makes in a year, plus benefits, to a Harry Reid appointee who has cost their agenda an order of magnitude more than she has cost the other side.

The strategic stakes go well beyond any single bill. The Save America Act, the overwhelmingly popular bill which would restore election integrity, has no path forward in reconciliation with MacDonough at the helm. The president’s border enforcement priorities cannot survive a Byrd Rule “merely incidental” objection from a staff lawyer who has already ruled that state authority to conduct immigration enforcement is “policy” rather than “budget.” Permanent extension of the 2017 tax cuts, prohibitions on Medicaid funding for illegal aliens, the REINS Act, suppressor deregulation, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, all of it dies in MacDonough’s office before it ever reaches the floor. None of this is constitutional necessity. All of it is political surrender dressed up as procedural propriety.

The Heritage Foundation has long argued, in its critique of the administrative state, that “the problem with lawmaking by bureaucrats is that agency personnel are unelected, which is central to republicanism.” The same critique applies with even greater force inside the legislative branch itself. A self-governing republic cannot outsource the substance of lawmaking to a staff lawyer accountable to no voter. James Madison, in Federalist 51, designed a system in which ambition would counteract ambition, in which elected officials would jealously guard the powers of their respective branches. He did not anticipate a Senate that would surrender its lawmaking authority to its own employees. The current arrangement is not what the Founders built. It is what a cowardly Senate has allowed to grow up in the cracks of what they built.

The path forward is straightforward. John Thune can replace Elizabeth MacDonough, as Trent Lott replaced Robert Dove. Vice President JD Vance, presiding over the Senate as Article I authorizes him to do, can rule against her advice when she is wrong, as Rockefeller did, as Humphrey did, as Barkley did. The Senate can appeal the chair’s ruling, as Reid did in 2013, as McConnell did in 2017, as the Republican majority itself did in May 2025. Better still, the Senate can ask the larger question Madison would have asked: why does the chamber need a single, unelected, $216,591.63 staff lawyer to tell elected senators which provisions of the people’s business are permitted to come to a vote? The answer, plainly stated, is that it does not. The office was created in 1935. It can be abolished in 2026. The senators the American people actually elected can run the chamber the American people actually gave them. The alternative is a republic in which a woman appointed by Harry Reid quietly edits the agenda of the man elected by 77 million Americans, and the Senate Majority Leader explains, with a straight face, that this is for our own good.

It is not for our own good. It is for no one’s good except the staff. Fire her. Or, better, abolish the office that lets her do this. The Constitution is on our side. The history is on our side. The voters are on our side. All that is missing is the will.

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APPENDIX: The MacDonough Kill List — Republican Priorities Struck or Forced Into Revision Across Both Trump Terms

First Term (2017-2021)

Better Care Reconciliation Act and Obamacare repeal, July 2017:

• Defunding Planned Parenthood for one year (struck July 21, 2017)

• Prohibition on ACA tax credits for plans covering abortion, with rape/incest/life-of-mother exceptions (struck July 21, 2017)

• Appropriation of ACA cost-sharing reduction funding

• Six-month waiting period for individuals without continuous coverage (the conservative individual-mandate replacement)

• “Buffalo Bailout” provision on New York county Medicaid payments

• Elimination of ACA minimum essential benefits for Medicaid managed-care plans

• Allowing insurers to charge older customers premiums up to 5x higher than younger customers

• Association health plans across state lines (Rand Paul priority)

• Sunset of the ACA 80/20 medical loss ratio rule

• Repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board

• State innovation waivers from ACA insurance regulations

Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, December 2017:

• The short title of the bill itself, “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” forcing a House revote and stripping the legislation of its branded name

• The Cruz provision allowing 529 plans for homeschool expenses

• Specific criteria for the private university endowment excise tax, including a religious-school carve-out

• Structural consequence: the entire individual-rate cut was forced to expire at the end of 2025 under the Byrd Rule’s deficit window, which is the entire reason the 2025 OBBBA fight was necessary in the first place

• Trump’s 2017 proposal to exempt Social Security benefits from federal taxation, blocked outright under Section 313

Second Term (2025-2026)

One Big Beautiful Bill Act, May-July 2025:

• Cap on state Medicaid provider taxes ($500+ billion in projected savings)

• Revocation of Medicare eligibility for certain non-citizens including refugees, asylum seekers, and TPS recipients

• Prohibition on federal Medicaid and CHIP funding for adults and children whose citizenship could not be immediately verified

• Reduction of the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage from 90% to 80% for states funding Medicaid for illegal aliens

• Prohibition on federal Medicaid and CHIP funding for gender-affirming medical care, including for minors

• Broader restrictions on Medicare and Medicaid coverage for non-citizen immigrants

• Grant of state authority to conduct border security and immigration enforcement

• Prohibition on SNAP access for non-citizens

• Restriction on ACA cost-sharing subsidies from lowering costs of abortion-covering plans

• Ending of “silver loading” under the ACA

• Additional Obamacare abortion funding restrictions

• Full defunding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (forced to half the original cut)

• The REINS Act, requiring congressional approval of major federal regulations

• NEPA judicial-review exemption for permitted infrastructure projects

• Forced federal divestiture of USPS electric vehicles

• Repeal of the Biden EPA vehicle emissions rule

• Multiple Inflation Reduction Act program eliminations (limited to clawback of unobligated funds only)

• FERS contribution rate increase for new federal employees refusing at-will conversion (Schedule F protection)

• Restrictions on federal court enforcement of injunctions against Trump executive orders

• IRS certification requirement for EITC child eligibility (replacing self-attestation)

• Deregulation of suppressors under the National Firearms Act ($200 NFA tax stamp elimination)

• Deregulation of short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns

• Expansion of private school vouchers, including the $4 billion private school tax credit

• Religious-school exemption from the TCJA endowments tax

• Major student loan and financial aid reforms, including repayment plan reductions

• Renewed defunding of Planned Parenthood (the second time she has killed this priority)

• An additional 20-25 provisions flagged for revision but never individually itemized in public reporting

Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Supplemental, May 2026:

• $1 billion Secret Service provision for White House ballroom and East Wing security, including approximately $220 million for “hardening” the construction site

• Two additional related provisions on the same Byrd Rule grounds, not individually itemized in public reporting

California EPA Vehicle Emissions Waivers, April 2025:

• Advised that the three EPA waivers were not “regulations” for Congressional Review Act purposes, blocking 51-vote disapproval. (This is the one ruling Republicans actually overrode, on May 22, 2025.)

Total publicly identifiable provisions struck or forced into revision across both Trump terms: more than 75. Total fiscal value of struck provisions on Medicaid alone: more than $500 billion. Total times the Republican Senate majority has overruled her: one. Total times the Republican Senate Majority Leader has fired her, in the 14 years she has been gutting Republican legislation: zero.

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Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com.