Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) office put out a statement Monday evening declaring success in his gambit to circumvent the filibuster and squeeze more opportunities to pass bills through reconciliation out of a clause in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
I believe Schumer is sitting in the fabled Catbird’s Seat.
Which means so are we.
Joe Manchin: “Hold my beer.”
There’s one in every crowd.
A post of mine from another thread (bracketed):
["In my opinion, we have got to show the American People what this legislations means:
In sales terms, it means that people are gonna have to be BEGGING for this legislation…nothing less…I am already begging for it…and it is going to do a lot more for the people WHO DON’T WANT IT than they can ever realize."]
Old headline said “dodge.” New headline:
Schumer Says The Parliamentarian Greenlit His Filibuster Workaround
Much better.
OT
Only if Schumer can figure out what to do with Sinema and Manchin.
You know they will do everything they can to obstruct and delay. They’ve all but said it out loud.
This is useful, to be sure, but only applies to certain kinds of funding bills. The effect of the ruling is limited and won’t be relevant to many of the things that Dems want to pass.
Limiting the filibuster to, at minimum(!), require a “talking” filibuster is still essential to eliminating the kind of anti-constitutional abuse that McConnell and Co. have been doing to exercise minority veto over the law making process.
Sinema doesn’t seem to be against a big infrastructure bill and neither is Manchin. If you remember a few weeks ago he was saying he wanted an especially robust bill, now he’s quibbling over the corporate tax rate. That seems to be his only real issue. He wants it at 25% instead of 28%. Methinks they’ll end up at 26 or 27% and call it a day. But both Manchin and Sinema have repeatedly said they want a big infrastructure bill and Sinema is in no position right now to be a holdout and, honestly, Mark Warner is making more noise against the bill than SInema is.
The infrastructure bill is tailor made for buying votes with pork. If they can’t buy off 10 Republicans with new rail museums and veterans’ memorial parks, then it just proves the need to reform campaign finance. Because it’s not ideology or the people who live there talking, it’s nonresident billionaires who wouldn’t be caught dead in a veterans’ memorial park.
Now I’m wondering about something from a few weeks back. Most of the guys in leadership have been playing this game for a very long time. Wondering if the “you can’t bend Senate rules to push the minimum wage hike through” thing wasn’t orchestrated so that the Parliamentarian could rule (properly) that you can’t do that.
Lends credence to this ruling 
So…is it actually the parliamentarian who is the most powerful person in regards to the Senate?
Not necessarily. If they are desperate enough Harris could overrule the parliamentarian and call for a vote. She would break the tie. The last parliamentarian was fired for crossing the majority.
There’s a lot of distance between ‘Greenlit’ and ‘Final Cut’.
I wouldn’t celebrate just yet and this does very little to help with the Voting Rights bill.
Going to very difficult to be vengeful to that many people when he’s no longer in the WH. 
So Infrastructure Week may actually have infrastructure?
This pretty much gives the Dems the runway they need to pass the infrastructure bills.
The two issues that remain outside this scope (unless there is some creative solution that the Parliamentarian will bless) are HR 1 and comprehensive immigration reform.
Creating an exception to the filibuster (or a one-off waiver) takes about 30 seconds + the time for a roll call vote to do. The issue is lining up your 50 votes, i.e., Manchin. The last 2 times the filibuster was ‘nuked’ Manchin voted against the point of order both times. That’s the Dems’ challenge, which is why Clyburn is going hard at Manchin. If McConnell could do his exception for SCOTUS Justices, Schumer should be able to get one for voting rights. On immigration, I think that could actually be done in 2023 if we beat the Republicans at the ballot box in '22 b/c a win by Dems in '22 would put a lot of GOPers in diverse states behind the 8 ball on that issue. It may also possible to do key pieces of this though the budget bills and maybe reconciliation if we do it as a wholesale re-make of DHS. However, given that the parliamentarian rejected min wage as part of reconciliation (I think Bernie was right on this and the Parliamentarian erred) I don’t really see her stretching it for immigration reform or voting rights.
I still think refusing to work with Democrats and vote for the infrastructure bill is bad politically for Republican Senators. The tax increase Biden is proposing is to the level that even the corporations supported until Trump and McConnell irresponsibly decided to lower them again the last minute.
