Trump Demands Republicans Fire the Senate Parliamentarian After She Blocked His Ballroom and Also Scrap the Filibuster

Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate Parliamentarian, ruled on May 16 that the Senate reconciliation bill cannot, as currently written, be used to fund Trump’s ballroom. In response, Trump issued a deranged Truth Social post calling on Senate Republicans to fire the Parliamentarian (and eliminate the filibuster) or else find themselves “looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible.”

Time has the story:

“Shockingly, Republicans have kept the very important position of ’Parliamentarian’ in the hands of a woman, Elizabeth MacDonough, who was appointed, long ago, by Barack Hussein Obama and a vicious Lunatic known as Senator Harry Reid, who ran the Senate for the Dumocrats with an iron fist,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced? … Get smart and tough Republicans, or you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!” …

MacDonough over the weekend ruled security funding for Trump’s new White House ballroom did not meet the strict guidelines governing what Republicans can include in the budget reconciliation package they are trying to pass. The proposal to allocate $1 billion in security additions for the White House and ballroom violated the Byrd Rule, she determined, as it was too broad to be included in the bill, which cannot be filibustered.

As with many of his tantrums, Trump is once again taking aim at the very idea of procedural checks on his authority and the bedrock principle that the other branches of government don’t simply exist to rubberstamp his pet projects but to check his unhinged designs. (This is the same ballroom that MAGA world tried to make happen by exploiting a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner, with a seemingly coordinated campaign of influencers and lawmakers insisting the attack proved the ballroom was a national security necessity.)

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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