President Donald Trump holds a press conference about the Big Beautiful Bill on Thursday, June 26.
On Wednesday Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News that the Senate parliamentarian had stripped eliminating social services for illegal aliens out of the legislation package:
“They say that when you do this budget reconciliation, the effect of the legislation has to be more monetary than policy, but it’s sort of a judgment call. So is it policy, that you don’t want illegal aliens to have welfare, or is that budgetary? Well, it saves a lot of money,” he explained. “They estimate, you know what, it’ll save hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars.”
“And that’s all the guesswork, you know, CBO and somebody else’s guesses what will happen if we do it. But then she has the unilateral, sole decision-making power to decide whether that’s policy or that’s budgetary,” he said of the Senate parliamentarian.
“We’re allowed to do budgetary things, but not policy things. So for example, one of the legislations that I’ve promoted for years is called the REINS Act, and it would say any regulation passed by bureaucrats, by the executive branch, if it’s a significant or major regulation — meaning that would impact the economy over $100 million — then what happens is it has to come back and be voted on by Congress,” he said.
On Thursday Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) dismissed calls for replacing Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough.
