Donald Trump desperately wants to build a giant ballroom next to the White House that no one has ever actually asked for, but the Senate Parliamentarian is now blocking the $1 billion Republicans were trying to steal from taxpayers to fund it.
It’s straight out of Hitler’s playbook. Trump tore down the iconic East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom that he will almost certainly name after himself. Underneath the ballroom would be a massive bunker that he will likely use to refuse to leave office.
Trump has insisted that “private” funding would pay for his pet project. But after the obviously staged “shooting” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Trump and his supporters used to justify building the ballroom, Republicans in Congress immediately tried to authorize $1 billion, an even higher price tag, to fund it.
To jam it through Congress, Republicans slipped the funding into the budget bill and have been attempting to use the budget reconciliation process, which requires only 51 votes for passage. Well, this scheme has failed for now after Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough nixed it for violating the Byrd Rule, according to a statement from Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon).
“The Parliamentarian’s advice is based on whether a provision is appropriate for reconciliation and conforms to the limitations of the Byrd Rule; it is not a judgement on the relative merits of a particular policy,” the statement says, going on to note the parliamentarian wrote that “a project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees.”
This means Republicans will have to find a new way to jam the ballroom funding through, or they’ll need 60 votes to pass it, which they will likely never achieve. You can bet the ketchup is flying at the White House over this new setback in Trump’s vanity project.
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