Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The media have done an absolutely rotten job of saying what’s in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The stories will say something about the deficit, then revert to the usual he-said she-said political junk. It’s infuriating.
As is so often the case these days, we have to depend on refugees from the mainstream media to provide us with very basic information that the mainstream media ignores so that it can focus on the inane political yipyap that it loves so much.
Jennifer Rubin, who resigned from the Washington Post and is now a part of “the Contrarian” on Substack, provides a partial list this morning of items in the bill that the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said are in violation of the Byrd Rule.
You’d almost think that the media don’t want us to understand just how corrupt and repulsive Republicans really are. And, yeah, let’s talk about campus protests and trans teenagers instead — you know, those real threats to America.
Jennifer Rubin’s list:
• A provision selling off millions of acres of federal lands
• A provision to pass food aid costs on to states
• Proposed limitations on food aid benefits to certain citizens or lawful permanent residents
• Proposed restrictions on the ability of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders
• A proposal for a funding cap for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and for slashing pay of employees at the Federal Reserve
• A proposal to slash $293 million from the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research
• A plan to dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
• An effort to repeal an EPA rule limiting air pollution emissions of passenger vehicles
• An item allowing project developers to bypass judicial environmental reviews if they pay a fee
• A measure deeming offshore oil and gas projects automatically compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act
• A modified version of the REINS Act, which would increase congressional power to overturn major regulations
• A scheme to punish so-called sanctuary cities by withholding federal grants
• An increase on Federal Employees Retirement System contribution rate for new civil servants who refuse to become at-will employees
• A measure seeking to extend the suspension of permanent price support authority for farmers
• A requirement forcing sale of all the electric vehicles used by the Post Office
• A change to annual geothermal lease sales and to geothermal royalties
• A proposal for a mining road in Alaska
• Authorization for the executive branch to reorganize federal agencies
• New fee for federal worker unions’ use of agency resources
• Transfer of space shuttle to a nonprofit in Houston from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum