The Senate parliamentarian has further reduced the scope of the budget reconciliation bill — otherwise known as the Big, Beautiful Bill — by ruling out the elimination of benefits for illegal aliens, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said during an interview on Breitbart News Daily.
“The Senate parliamentarian, you know, ruled out any kind of elimination of benefits for illegal aliens. So we have basically an unelected, you know, person works in the Senate has now decided that she can decide for the country that we can’t eliminate welfare for illegal aliens, which is, to me, insane that we allow that to happen,” Paul began, referencing the decision to rule out eliminating Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for non-citizens.
“What did she say about health care for illegal aliens or welfare for illegal aliens?” host Mike Slater pressed.
Paul essentially explained that the effects of budget reconciliation must be more monetary than policy, but it is ultimately a judgment call on what goes under which category. But Paul contends that removing illegals from welfare benefits saves a lot of money.
“They say that when you do this budget reconciliation, the effect of the legislation has to be more monetary than policy, but it’s sort of a judgment call. So is it policy, that you don’t want illegal aliens to have welfare, or is that budgetary? Well, it saves a lot of money,” he explained. “They estimate, you know what, it’ll save hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars.”
“And that’s all the guesswork, you know, CBO and somebody else’s guesses what will happen if we do it. But then she has the unilateral, sole decision-making power to decide whether that’s policy or that’s budgetary,” he said of the Senate parliamentarian.
“We’re allowed to do budgetary things, but not policy things. So for example, one of the legislations that I’ve promoted for years is called the REINS Act, and it would say any regulation passed by bureaucrats, by the executive branch, if it’s a significant or major regulation — meaning that would impact the economy over $100 million — then what happens is it has to come back and be voted on by Congress,” he said.
“Well, that would save a lot of money, because these have a great deal of impact on the economy,” he said, but he noted that the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that this is policy and therefore does not get to be included either.
“And this is what we’ve been going through for the last week. Basically, people have been elected to represent entire states, Senators from both parties go and beseech her on bended knee, and they say, ‘Please, please, please, include my policy in the bill.’ And then she gets to decide. It’s just this amazing power where she is the sole decider on this, and she’s never been elected to anything,” Paul added.
He noted that this individual is appointed. “It’s a sort of a charade. It’s been going on since 1974 and like most of the reforms from the 1970s, they had the opposite sort of effect. The budget law, or Budget Act of 1974 was intended to have us pass budgets. Well, since then, we have passed very few, if any, budgets, and so it didn’t really work,” he said. “It was intended to correct deficits. Since then, the deficits have exploded.”
“So really the Budget Act didn’t work, but the Budget Act set this up and set up the Senate parliamentarian as the person to make the decision,” he said, making it clear that he is not alleging that this individual is biased. “I’m just alleging it’s too much power for an unelected person to have, and it gets into the weeds of what’s policy and what’s budget,” he said.
“But when it comes to expanding spending under the Democrats, her rulings have been very expansive to let Democrats do pretty much what they want on the spending front, but when it comes to cutting spending, she’s been much more parsimonious with allowing us to cut spending using these rules,” Paul continued. “Most Americans just would be shocked to know that their elected officials are held hostage by an unelected bureaucrat.”
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