Rep. Dan Crenshaw became the first House Republican this year to call on Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she announced certain provisions of the GOP reconciliation bill would need to be removed or changed to meet a simple majority threshold.
The Senate Budget Committee announced on Thursday MacDonough rejected several health care provisions from the bill, including one that would have banned Medicaid funds from being used to cover gender-affirming care for transgender people of all ages — a provision that Crenshaw led in the House.
Crenshaw told NOTUS that the removal of the language was “infuriating and wrong.”
“We established a very clear case for why it should pass the Byrd Rule,” he said.
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MacDonough declared that multiple pieces of the bill could not pass the Senate via reconciliation, and senators would need to find 60 votes for them to pass.
Two Republican senators, Tommy Tuberville and Roger Marshall, have also urged Thune to fire MacDonough. The lawmakers are citing a 2001 precedent, when former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott fired the then-Senate parliamentarian Robert B. Dove while considering a reconciliation bill.
MacDonough did not immediately respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.
The parliamentarian, Crenshaw said in a statement, “has failed to apply the rules of reconciliation accurately on multiple occasions.” The congressman added that she has “shown clear political bias, applying ideology and not the rules of the Senate.”
“There are many examples of this so far, but today was the final red line for me,” Crenshaw said. “She struck my provision that stops federal funding for gender transition procedures, claiming it doesn’t have budgetary impact and therefore is ‘out of order.’”
Thune once overruled decisions made by MacDonough earlier this Congress, and there’s a growing call for the Senate majority leader to overrule her again during this reconciliation process.
“If only that were our decision. The senators have to make that call. I mean, I can make a case for it, but no one’s asked me,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters.
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Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS.
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