Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled against the Democrats on Sunday. Their massive reconciliation bill cannot include amnesty because it is not considered to be a budgetary manner. Budget reconciliation is the only way for the Democrats to push the $3.5 trillion “infrastructure” bill through because the Republicans are not on board.
Even some Democrats are failing to see the point here but that’s another story for another time. Let’s just say that good old Joe Manchin is already making his gripes heard. The Democrats are trying harder and harder to get sneaky here as well. They even attempted to sneak in some immigration reform because they know that they are never going to get the 60 votes that they need.
The Senate Parliamentarian is rejecting those efforts. They do not want the Democrats to give the immigrants a path to citizenship because they may gain access to “other, life-changing federal, state and societal benefits.” Politico has more about this ongoing stalemate:
“The Senate parliamentarian on Sunday rejected Democrats’ push to include a pathway to legal status in their social spending plan, a blow to the party’s efforts to enact immigration reform.
In the decision, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, the parliamentarian determined that the Democrats’ proposal is “by any standard a broad, new immigration policy” and that the policy change “substantially outweighs the budgetary impact of that change.”
In their arguments before the Senate parliamentarian, a former immigration attorney, Democrats made the case that providing green cards to an estimated 8 million Dreamers, farmworkers, Temporary Protected Status recipients, and essential workers during the pandemic had a budgetary impact because it would make more people eligible for certain federal benefits. That, in turn, would increase the deficit by more than $130 billion, according to Democratic estimates.
But the parliamentarian in her ruling stated that providing legal status through reconciliation would also lead to “other, life-changing federal, state and societal benefits.”
Providing permanent legal status “would give these persons freedom to work, freedom to travel, freedom to live openly in our society in any state in the nation, and to reunite with their families and it would make them eligible, in time, to apply for citizenship — things for which there is no federal fiscal equivalent.”
In addition, the parliamentarian rejected arguments from Democrats that there is a precedent for including immigration reform in reconciliation. Democrats frequently pointed to a 2005 GOP-led reconciliation bill that addressed a visa backlog.”
Near as we can tell, the wind is no longer blowing in the Democrats’ direction. No one was all that thrilled about allowing this bill to pass in the first place. Now, the Democrats are trying their best to play catch up. They want to push all sorts of nonsense through because they know that this is their only chance to do so.
It makes sense from their perspective but they are not going to be as successful as they would have hoped for. In the meantime, we are wondering what comes next. Are the Republicans going to allow this bill to be passed as long as the amnesty provision is gone? We hope that we are not going to be screwed over by the Republicans in name only.
These are the Republicans that Trump spent his whole presidency fighting with. He warned us about these charlatans at every turn. This is what the Democrats are banking on. They are hoping that the Republicans get so tired of having these types of arguments that they eventually cave in.
Manchin is standing strong and he might end up being the one that has to be convinced, for all we know. Either way, this is shaping up to be quite the ongoing battle but we are obviously hoping that the Democrats are bested. They are the ones who are trying their absolute best to get over the American people. It’s time that we draw the line.