Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Jeff Merkley announced in a Friday night press release that the Senate parliamentarian had ruled that the following items in the Big Beautiful Bill had failed the “Byrd Test” of whether they can be passed under the filibuster threshold: “Matching Funds. This section mandates that states cover a portion of SNAP benefits with the state share escalating with payment error rates” and “Alien SNAP Eligibility. This section removes SNAP eligibility for immigrants who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents, with certain exceptions.”

In plainer English either they need to be stripped out of the bill or modified in a way that complies with the chamber’s arcane and fairly rules about the filibuster applying to anything and everything that isn’t either a nomination or a direct addition or subtraction to federal expenditures, which require a simple majority. If it’s seen by the parliamentarian as a change to actual law then it needs to get 60 votes, which the Big Beautiful Bill will not, ever. The ruling came a day after a similar list of Ls for MAGA as the parliamentarian had also ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s budget could not be reduced to $0 and $1.4 billion could not be cut from the salaries of the Federal Reserve staff, among other comically corrupt and insane bullshit in the Mega MAGA bill.

Senate Republicans, especially those aligned with John Thune and Moscow Mitch, are extremely wary of being seen as doing anything to overrule or circumvent the parliamentarian since it would require a separate procedural vote that might not actually get a majority which would be tantamount to abolishing the filibuster, which is the only thing keeping a vast amount of the GOP’s permanently entrenched power structure intact. Ending it just to fuck over some poor people now would in the future theoretically open the door to the Democrats gutting the Supreme Court’s power, crushing corrupt billionaires’ influence over politics, naturalizing millions of undocumented immigrants, and so on and so forth. Emphasis on “theoretically” because Chuck Schumer’s still too much of a pussy to do anything that bold and it’d take a whole new leadership team to think and act that big.