Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe we have to draw the line somewhere south of the pig’s snout and north of his rectum. Maybe the sausage-making has gotten so disgusting, so all-inclusive, so utterly out of hand that the Senate parliamentarian is acting as sort of an FDA for this One Big Beautiful Abomination Bill.
Or not. Yeah, definitely or not.
What had already been a massive spendapalooza meant to skirt a looming Democrat filibuster via the workaround process known as budget reconciliation is now even more larded up, because all the best reform initiatives have been stripped out of it — all thanks to an obscure, unelected, and ostensibly nonpartisan bureaucrat known as the Senate parliamentarian.
The axing of Honest Injun’s meddlesome Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Adios. The repeal of Biden-era electric vehicle mandates and subsidies? Aloha. The $128 billion reform of our bloated and wasteful food stamp program? Arrivederci. The restriction of federal funds being doled out to lawless sanctuary cities? Auf Wiedersehen. The rulemaking reform directed at mischievous and unaccountable regulatory agencies? Shalom. The at-will reform that allows seditious civil service employees to be fired just like the rest of us? Sayonara.
Perhaps worst of all, the attempt by Senate Republicans to deny a relative handful of despotic federal judges — looking at you, James Boasberg — the ability to block Donald Trump’s policies with dubious nationwide injunctions has also been ruled ineligible for reconciliation within the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is this president’s signature tax-and-spend legislation. That useful provision had been crafted by Iowa’s ageless Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican chairman. It was, of course, derided by Senate Democrats such as Minority Whip Dick Durbin as “simply an attempted power grab by our Republican colleagues that we would not stand for.”
Or, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer put it, “Senate Republicans tried to write Donald Trump’s contempt for the courts into law — gutting judicial enforcement, defying the Constitution, and bulldozing the very rule of law that forms our democracy.”
It’s a Republic, Chuckie Boy. But whatever.
The OBBBA thus must undergo what’s called a Byrd bath, in honor of Robert Byrd, the former Democrat Klansman and Senate majority leader who in the 1980s argued that certain legislative provisions that are considered “extraneous” to fiscal matters must be removed from the legislation in order for it to merit passage under budget reconciliation.
So Byrd, in addition to having every park and highway and public building in West Virginia named for him, gets the credit for allowing an obscure Senate officer to take a chainsaw to the reform-minded provisions of a duly elected president’s budget bill. You can practically hear the Leftmedia’s celebration.
President Trump, for his part, seems most intent on getting to end-of-job, even if it means losing some of these key Republican provisions. As he posted on Truth Social earlier this morning:
Now that we have made PEACE abroad, we must finish the job here at home by passing “THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” and getting the Bill to my desk, ASAP. It will be a Historic Present for THE GREAT PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, as we begin the Celebration of our Country’s 250th Birthday. We are finally entering our Golden Age, which will bring unprecedented Safety, Security, and Prosperity for ALL of our Citizens. To my friends in the Senate, lock yourself in a room if you must, don’t go home, and GET THE DEAL DONE THIS WEEK. Work with the House so they can pick it up, and pass it, IMMEDIATELY. NO ONE GOES ON VACATION UNTIL IT’S DONE. Everyone, most importantly the American People, will be much better off thanks to our work together. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Any way we carve it up, this is going to be one awful-tasting piece of sausage. But OBBBA is Donald Trump’s agenda, and it needs to be passed.
