Quote:Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough just dealt a massive blow To Democrats.

MacDonough informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden that only one more automatic budget reconciliation is permissible this year.

The Senate is currently tied at 50-50, but Kamala Harris can cast the tie-breaking vote and give Democrats the majority vote.

Democrats want to end the filibuster so they do not need 60 votes to pass legislation.

If Democrats ended the filibuster, they would only need a 51-vote majority to pass much of Biden’s radical agenda.

MacDonough’s ruling likely just ended all hope for Democrats of being able to end the filibuster — at least in 2021.

MacDonough ruled that a revision to the 2021 budget resolution cannot be automatically discharged from the Senate Budget Committee, meaning Democrats would need at least one Republican on the 11-11 panel to vote with them.

The bombshell ruling effectively means Schumer will be able to use only one more reconciliation vehicle to pass Biden’s key legislative priorities this year.

He will not be able to divide up the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, as well as Biden’s calls to expand Medicare and lower the price of prescription drugs, into multiple reconciliation packages, as was envisioned only a few weeks ago.

MacDonough wrote:

Unlike the 301 resolution, a section 304 resolution is an optional procedure untethered to the Section 300 structure. There is no deadline for its reporting from the committee or its completion in the Senate.”

That kind of chaos was not at all what was intended with auto-discharge. Rather, the purpose of auto-discharge is to provide an incentive for committee compliance with the law and to provide a remedy when compliance with and through the mandatory processes of the Congressional Budget Act have not been met.

The drafters and early users of 304 uniformly believed that it was to be used in extraordinary circumstances and not for things that should have been or could have been foreseen and handled in a 301 resolution.

The potential for abuse was clear in 1974 and is all the more obvious now. Auto-discharge is not appropriate for a 304 resolution.

There’s even better news: two Senate Democrats have come out against ending the filibuster.

So, it’s practically guaranteed that Democrats can’t end the filibuster.

West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin said under “no circumstance” will he support ending the filibuster.

Manchin also said would be “opposed to using the budget reconciliation process, under which certain legislation requires only a majority vote, again to circumvent the filibuster, an avenue Senate Democrats have considered for passing Biden’s ambitious infrastructure package.”

Arizona Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema again defended the Senate filibuster this week.

Sinema said she supports keeping the filibuster because it “protects the democracy of our nation.”

“As folks in Arizona know, I’ve long been a supporter of the filibuster because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation, rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies,” Sinema said.