K Street Unpacks Senate Parliamentarian’s Latest
Public Policy & Regulation attorney Rich Gold was quoted in a POLITICO article about Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough's guidance regarding additional budget reconciliation packages being sought by Senate Democrats. She said that recycling budget resolutions could be ripe for abuse and cannot be automatically discharged from the Budget Committee to the floor.
The prospect of passing another major bill through reconciliation wasn’t ever a realistic outcome, said Mr. Gold. “Given where Sens. [Joe] Manchin, [Kyrsten] Sinema, some of the other centrists are,” he argued, Democrats were never “going to run all of the legislation this year through reconciliation.”
Add the pressure to take action on the debt limit by fall, and Democrats are “at the tail end of how long we can wait” to put together an infrastructure reconciliation bill, he added. “There's the bipartisan path, where life is a little bit easier. And this has got to be what Biden is seeing” as he continues negotiations with Republicans.