Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough
Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough on Sunday ruled Democrats cannot include amnesty in their gargantuan reconciliation bill because it not a budget-related matter.
The Democrats are pushing their $3.5 trillion “infrastructure” bill through budget reconciliation to go around Republicans because it will only need a simple majority to pass.
Democrat lawmakers tried to sneak immigration reform in the infrastructure bill because they know it will never pass in a vote that requires at least 60 votes to pass.
The Senate Parliamentarian rejected the Democrats’ effort to give illegals a pathway to citizenship because it would lead to “other, life-changing federal, state and societal benefits.”
Politico reported:
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.
The Senate parliamentarian ruled against allowing Democrats to include a pathway to legal status for an estimated 8 million undocumented immigrants in their massive social spending plan https://t.co/2XBpRaprZL
— POLITICO (@politico) September 20, 2021
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