Aug. 15, 2025 · by Amy West

Hi all,

So we still have your questions and have not forgotten about them!

In fact, a post that we’d originally intended to post last week or possibly the week before is still in limbo because of a disagreement in-house about how to approach the question. So if you ever feel like you should already understand everything about Congress, be assured that even folks who think about Congress all the time don’t necessarily agree on what they understand or how to say it.

In the meantime, we’re going to take two other questions that are a little bit simpler.

When can the military be used domestically?

If you thought this had a cut and dried answer, you would not be alone. One thing that this administration is making clear is that, if it can be litigated, then the answer is not cut and dried. We addressed this in The law President Trump used to deploy the National Guard, and what might happen next. For what it’s worth, the trial in Los Angeles over whether the administration’s deployment of military in June violated the Posse Comitatus Act is ongoing. Both sides rested this week, but the judge hasn’t issued a ruling yet.

What’s the deal with the Senate Parlimentarian?

Conveniently, the Bipartisan Policy Center has already answered this question.

In their post What is the Role of the Senate Parliamentarian? they note that

• the position is relatively new, having only been formalized in the early 20th century
• the position is advisory only, meaning that Senators can ignore the recommendations from the Parliamentarian and
• that because the Senate is an ongoing body, in which rules carry over from Congress to Congress, most of the change to rules comes in changes to precedents, of which the Parliamentarian keeps track.

With respect to item two above, Senators mostly follow the Parliamentarian’s advice. This has generally been most likely when reconciliation bills are in process. However, this year, the Senate Republican majority chose to ignore the Parliamentarian’s advice or bypass her role in two different ways that may mean new precedents in the Senate if Democrats act similarly when they next have control of the chamber.

Regulatory Waivers

The first case was about regulatory waivers issued to the state of California during the Biden administration. The Government Accountability Office and the Parliamentarian both agreed that the waivers did not fall under the Congressional Review Act rules for overturning regulations.

If the Senate had followed the Parliamentarian’s advice, then they could not have voted to overturn the waivers because such a vote would need a 60 vote passage for one or more procedural votes. The only way to overturn those waivers was to rely on a simple majority, which the Senate Republicans have.

So, Senate Republicans voted instead on a slightly different question about whether the waivers fall under the Congressional Review Act. That vote passed and the waivers were overturned. Technically they didn’t ignore the Parliamentarian, but functionally they definitely did.

How to count deficit effects

The bulk of the reconciliation bill passed this year focused on making the tax cuts in a 2017 bill permanent. But reconciliation bills are not supposed to add to the federal deficit. So, to make the tax cuts permanent and meet reconciliation requirements, the bill would have to raise lots of revenue in some other way or the Senate majority could change how they count.

The Senate majority decided to change how they count. There is the “current law baseline” which estimates about a $4 trillion dollar increase to the federal deficit versus the “current policy baseline” which estimates little or no increase to the deficit. The difference between the two approaches is that under current law, the tax cuts expire and estimates are created accordingly while under current policy the tax cuts are assumed to be extended in which case they make no difference to future deficits.

If the Senate Budget Committee had stuck to the current law baseline, then the tax cuts would be subject to review under the Byrd rule by the Parliamentarian and probably most would have been ruled as ineligible because of how much they’d add to the deficit. By deciding in committee that the analysis would based on current policy though, Senate Republicans bypassed an otherwise thorny situation in which they might have to jettison provisions because of cost or ignore the Parliamentarian repeatedly.

Like with the regulatory waivers, the Senate majority didn’t directly challenge the Parliamentarian. Instead, they used other procedural maneuvers to bypass having to go to the Parliamentarian at all.

That said, for the remaining provisions in the reconciliation bill, the Parliamentarian did do a review and items she advised violated the rules were ultimately pulled. So the Senate majority didn’t completely ignore the Parliamentarian; just on the things they cared about the most: overturning regulatory waivers promoting electric vehicles and retaining tax cuts.