How One Woman Who 'You've Probably Never Heard Of' Could Block Some Of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

Forbes Breaking News

As the Senate takes up consideration of the House-passed tax and budget-cutting package, Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough will have a crucial vote on its contents. Forbes senior writer Kelly Phillips Erb joins "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss.   Read the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2025/06/10/this-woman-could-block-some-controversial-parts-of-trumps-big-bill/

Transcript

00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now

00:07is my Forbes colleague, senior writer Kelly Phillips-Erb. Kelly, thanks so much for joining

00:12me. Thank you for having me. Last month, the House passed President Trump's one big, beautiful bill

00:19in a narrow early morning vote, and the over 1,000-page legislation holds his signature tax

00:24and immigration policies. It's now before the Senate, and it seems that Democrats and Republicans

00:29can only agree on the fact that changes need to be made in order for it to be passed. Some of the

00:35big points of contention include cuts to Medicaid, as well as the bill estimated to add trillions of

00:41dollars to the deficit. But you're reporting that the largest hurdle this could face in the Senate

00:46might not be a senator at all. Can you explain? Sure. So what you just mentioned, a lot of the

00:52pieces of the one big, beautiful bill act, they are calling it ABBA. One of the things that is

00:59important about ABBA is that there's not enough Senate support to overcome a filibuster in ABBA.

01:06So what that necessarily means is that they can't rely on just having a majority because they would

01:12need a supermajority. And as we know, very narrow margins in the Senate. So they have to resort to a

01:18process called reconciliation. And reconciliation has very, very specific rules. And to enforce these

01:25rules, they need somebody to take a look at them and kind of call them out and say, hey, this might

01:30apply here. And the person who does that is called the Senate parliamentarian. And in this case, the

01:36person who's serving currently is a woman. Her name is Elizabeth McDonough. And she's been in the role since

01:412012. The role of parliamentarian has actually been around about 100 years. But it's her job to sort of look

01:50through the bill and tell the presiding officer of the Senate, who happens to be J.D. Vance, the vice

01:55president, what can and cannot be voted on through reconciliation. If she pulls it out of reconciliation,

02:02that doesn't mean it can't go on. It just means that they'd have to vote on it and they'd have to

02:07have at least 60 votes to pass that part of it. So yeah, so she holds a lot of power and you probably

02:13never even heard of her. That is a lot of power. And as you said, she's been in this position

02:19since 2012, meaning that she's held the role of Senate parliamentarian under a Republican White

02:26House, under a Democrat White House, when a Republican and when a Democrat both served as

02:32Senate majority leaders. So is this role nonpartisan? So it's supposed to be. So the role of the

02:39parliamentarian is supposed to be nonpartisan. The job of the parliamentarian is not to decide

02:44whether or not something is good or bad for the country, but does it follow the rules? And as an

02:50attorney, which was her previous job, this is something that, you know, attorneys do all the

02:55time. Look at something and you're not supposed to say, is it good or it's bad? It's supposed to be,

02:59what does it say? And so she's supposed to interpret it as, you know, in as much of a bipartisan way or

03:06nonpartisan, I guess would be a better way to say it as possible. And she's, you know, she's gotten

03:11into trouble over it before. It's not, and by getting gotten into trouble, I don't mean that she's

03:17chastised, but you know, she's not always popular, right? Because if she says something that the

03:22majority party doesn't want to hear, that can be off quitting. And I mean, this sounds like a role

03:28that you can, if you care about popularity, if you care about being liked, maybe this really isn't

03:33the job for you. But is her word the law of the land? Can she be overruled by anyone in the Senate?

03:40So yes, she can be, but it's a little tricky. The easiest way to overrule her is for the provision

03:47itself to get the 60 votes, right? So the Senate could say, we don't need it thrown out because

03:52if she's looking at this reconciliation piece and she says, this doesn't fit, you have to throw it out.

03:57They can say, we don't want to throw it out. We have the 60 votes. We don't care. But more typically,

04:01if she were to be overruled, it would come from the presiding officer of the Senate.

04:05And this actually did happen. It's happened recently. When the American Rescue Plan was being

04:11debated, it was also going to be a reconciliation bill, which means that the Democrats who were then

04:18the majority in the Senate didn't have the 60 votes, but they did have the majority votes.

04:24And one of the provisions that they included was to raise the federal minimum wage to $15.

04:29That would be something that wouldn't be allowed under the Byrd rule, because the Byrd rule,

04:36which is what governs reconciliation, has a lot of no-nos. And one of them is that you can't

04:41attach something to a reconciliation bill that doesn't directly impact the budget. And that's

04:47actually what's happening now, one of the things that she's looking at to see. But that's also what

04:52happened under the ARP or the American Rescue Plan. And what happened was she went to the presiding

04:59officer of the Senate, who at that time was Vice President Kamala Harris, and said, this piece

05:04of the bill can't stand. And Harris had the opportunity to say no, which would be politically

05:11fraught, because again, this role's been there 100 years, and it's typically respected. And many of her

05:17Democratic colleagues encouraged her to not pay attention to the advice of the parliamentarian,

05:24but Harris did. It got removed from the bill. And as you know, minimum wage was not boosted to $15

05:31because it was taken out of the ARPA, the American Rescue Plan. And so, you know, it could happen.

05:38Will it happen this time? We're not sure. We'd like to think that precedent stands. So we'll see.

05:45Remains to be seen. But as you said, the process of reconciliation, it favors a party with a small

05:51majority to get the bill through the door to get the bill passed. But the Byrd rule, as you mentioned,

05:56is a component here. And I would love for you to dive a little deeper in there. The Byrd rule is

06:00named after the late Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia. And the parliamentarian has to

06:06interpret this rule. So how exactly do they do that? And dive a little deeper into what that rule exactly

06:11is. Sure. So the Byrd rule is, it applies to the reconciliation process, which again, as you mentioned,

06:18is when you don't have the supermajority, you just have a majority. And because of that,

06:23there are some restrictions on what the bill can have in it. And one of the things, and actually is

06:29one of the things that matters the most here, is that the bill cannot significantly add to the

06:34deficit. If it can, it can't be made permanent. It can only have temporary provisions in it. So if

06:40you think back, one of the things that we're looking at right now is whether to make the tax cuts

06:45and jobs act provision, and that was 2017, whether to make those permanent, the individual tax

06:52provisions under the tax cuts and jobs act were not made permanent earlier, because they didn't

06:58have the votes. So they had to do that under reconciliation, which is why it only lasted eight

07:02years, those eight years have now come to an end. So at the end of 2025, they're expiring. The question

07:08is, do they want to extend them or not? Do they have the votes to be able to do this under

07:14reconciliation? They think yes. Do they have the votes for a supermajority? No. So usually,

07:20they wouldn't be able to extend these and make these permanent. They would have to do like another

07:25series of temporary cuts. I think they have other spending cuts somewhere in the budget that will

07:31offset the tax cuts. So the cuts to revenue would be offset by cuts to spending to kind of eke it in,

07:38under the bird rule. So we'll see if that gets flagged. If it does, what they typically do is

07:44make those cuts temporary, because then that means that it's not extending it too long. Another thing

07:50that's significant is that under the bird rule, you're not allowed to tack on other parts of

07:57legislation. You know, we think of that as pork. There's a lot of conversation about whether there's

08:01pork in the bill. You can't add anything to the bill that doesn't have to do with the budget.

08:05So I already mentioned the minimum wage, but like you typically can't add policy pieces in unless they

08:13have a budget component. Now, one of the ways that Congress tries to get around this is they sort of

08:18pretend that things have a budget component. So the provision that's getting a lot of notice right now

08:24is the contempt order. There is a provision that has been written in to make it more difficult for

08:30judges to hold the federal government in contempt of court unless the private citizen that's bringing

08:36the action or the private organization that's bringing the action post the bond. Most of us do

08:41not have the financial means to post the bond to actually, you know, resolve any damages against the

08:47federal government, which is sort of what this bond is intended to do. So it's in essence sort of saying

08:54that judges will have much less power than they had before. Now, is that a budget, a part of the budget?

09:00You would think not. So they added on some language that says that any federal funds that have been used

09:08in this lawsuit more or less, then this action would come in, this contempt action would come in.

09:14That's supposed to make it kind of budgety. I don't know that it's enough under the Byrd rule to make it

09:20budgety. And most people think that it is not. It may come out. Another one that got a lot of press

09:27is the AI moratorium. So there was a provision that was written into the budget that would prevent

09:35states from sort of instituting their own AI rules for about 10 years. And this was very upsetting to

09:45a lot of states in particular that feel very strongly about their right to regulate their own

09:50industries. And infamously, Marjorie Taylor Greene said afterwards on Twitter, well, now X, Twitter,

09:59that she did not read the bill. She did not know that it was in the bill or she wouldn't have voted

10:03for it. And that if it comes back to her, she'll vote against it. Keeping in mind that the House had

10:08very, very slim margin, you know, that would be a flip that would matter. But it may not come to that,

10:15because again, it may get pulled out of the bill, because it may not have even been allowed to be in the

10:19bill under the bird rule. So the bird rule has, you know, six or seven things that you're not allowed

10:24to either include or touch. The other big one that I'll just mention is Social Security and Medicare.

10:30And if you're wondering why, when Trump made certain campaign promises for no tax on tips,

10:36no tax on overtime, those were included in the budget, but with the budget bill, but the no tax on

10:43Social Security that he promised did not make it into the budget bill. What we have instead is a no

10:49tax on what's actually not no tax. It is an increased deduction on seniors, which is intended to sort of

10:56have the result of no tax on Social Security. There's a lot of discussion about how that was

11:01probably crafted that way, so that it didn't even touch the part of the bird rule that says you can't

11:07impact Social Security. So, you know, a lot of moving parts, a lot of rules under the bird rule

11:14that she has to look at. And again, you mentioned at the top that the bill is really, really, really,

11:20you know, significant. It's long. It's a lot to get through. So this is not a let me just skim this

11:27over and see if anything jumps out at me. She has to look at a lot of pieces to see, you know, are we

11:31allowed to to vote on this? Should this be in here? What kind of recommendations do I need to make

11:36here? And if she makes recommendations that something needs to be cut, those may not end up

11:42in the final bill. That's important because the House passed it with a narrow margin. It hasn't been

11:47voted on yet in the Senate. If those pieces get pulled out and the Senate approves it, it has to go

11:52back to the House and then has to be approved again. And to your point, Elon Musk, when he was getting in

11:58that feud with Donald Trump, he posted on social media that this bill was a disgusting

12:03abomination, that it was pork filled. And that seemed to really open the floodgates to Marjorie

12:08Taylor Greene saying, I didn't read that part of the bill. I mean, the bill was over a thousand pages.

12:13Other House Republicans who voted yes also criticized the bill. But to our point, we keep going back to is

12:19just how slim of margins this passed in the House and it will need to pass in the Senate. There's already

12:26a handful of Republicans who've raised concerns about different elements in this bill that are

12:31in the Senate right now. And the GOP and the Senate can only afford to lose three votes if everyone is

12:36there and if every Democrat votes against it. And President Trump wants this bill on his desk by July

12:424th. But according to lawmakers own admissions, I mean, that seems more like a pipe dream instead of a

12:48self-imposed deadline. Because this isn't a sure thing right now that this will even pass, how important

12:54is the Senate parliamentarian's role? Oh, extremely important. Because again, if they could keep

13:00everything as is, there were a few things that would still not line up because the Senate did pass a

13:06no tax on tips bill of its own. So it does not match that part of the House bill. But assuming that

13:12everything else stayed in the bill and it passed by, well, we know you mentioned that we know there's

13:19some opposition. Senator Rand Paul, we're pretty sure is a no just because of the deficit, adding

13:25to the deficit. So that gives 52 votes to the Republicans in the Senate and they can't afford

13:32to lose those. So we know they don't have the 60, but they couldn't even afford to lose the two,

13:39right? So if it went through as is and everybody loved it, there's still a problem. But once the Senate

13:46parliamentarian kind of works for magic and says, this is what you can and cannot vote for,

13:51pulling those provisions out when it goes back to the House, where it also had a very narrow margin,

13:56you know, do people care enough about it? And one of the things in particular that I didn't

14:00mention earlier, but when I talked about the deficit, one of the things that's super important

14:05is, you know, what can they cut? And in the House, there are several Republicans that are in states

14:11where the SALT deduction, which is the state and local tax deduction, matters a whole lot. So when

14:16you look at the House representatives, you can see that there are some representatives in states like

14:22New York, where the SALT tax cap matters. And the tax cap, what it was is under the Tax Caps of Jobs Act,

14:30they actually put a $10,000 cap on the amount of state and local taxes that you could deduct on your

14:35federal tax return. That really hurt some taxpayers in certain states, high income taxpayers in places

14:42like New York, New Jersey, Texas, California. And in those states that yelled the loudest in the House,

14:50they did make changes to it. So they actually put that, they moved the cap up to 40.

14:55The Senate, when it got to the Senate, the senators were, they're not as inclined to increase the cap

15:01because there's not a single senator who is a Republican senator in most of the high tax states,

15:07especially in the Northeast. So we're looking at New York and New Jersey in particular. So there's

15:12not the same amount of pressure in the Senate to boost that cap so that cap could come down. Again,

15:18they're looking, the Senate is looking for ways to keep the spending down so that they can push the

15:23parts of the bill through that they want. The parliamentarian is going to be looking at those

15:28numbers and saying it either does or does not increase the deficit by how much over what period

15:32of time. And she may be the reason that something like that gets pulled.

15:37It's really interesting because she's certainly not a household name. This

15:40position isn't known by the average American, but it's really interesting how she has the potential to

15:47really drastically change President Trump's signature policies and legislation here. Kelly,

15:52I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for your expertise. And I hope to speak with you again

15:57soon. Thank you. I'd love that.

Category

Transcript

Recommended