Taylor Giorno at NOTUS:
The time during which a reconciliation bill is with the Senate parliamentarian would be a prime opportunity for lobbyists to get provisions tweaked or washed out.
Except the industry built on access has little influence with her: Elizabeth MacDonough is one of the rare players on Capitol Hill that refuses to meet with lobbyists.
“Cursing them. Yes. Lobbying them. No,” one Republican lobbyist texted NOTUS of the parliamentarian.
MacDonough is “effectively one of the most powerful women in the free world,” a Democratic lobbyist told NOTUS. Senate committees have been working for weeks with the parliamentarian on several facets of the Republican mega-bill, and they’ve already had to rework parts of the bill that the parliamentarian rejected.
While lobbyists can’t directly lobby the parliamentarian, several said they are trying to backchannel their demands through the process. Their targets include Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a tax on profits from third-party litigation funding and a 10-year moratorium on new state artificial intelligence regulations.
“A large part of the role we play is helping educate the staff and give them the ammunition to make the best arguments to their boss, for the parliamentarian,” Rich Gold, a Holland & Knight partner and leader of the firm’s public policy and regulation group, told NOTUS.
If a client is concerned about a provision in the bill, lobbyists could draft a Byrd memo to bring to senate staffers or provide them with “whatever supplementary information I think would be helpful in making the argument to knock a provision out of the bill,” the Democratic lobbyist said.
“A lobbyist like myself, we insert ourselves into the process by supplying evidence and arguments and detail to the minority, if they wish to use it, for including in their memo and their arguments to the parl,” they added.
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“If you’re asking me, ‘Can you bamboozle Elizabeth?’ The answer is no,” said Jim Manley, who spent more than two decades working in the Senate, including a stint with the late Democratic leader, Harry Reid.
“There’s no lobbyists sitting there manipulating the process,” Manley added, although he noted lobbyists “serve increasingly as a research arm for staffers on Capitol Hill.”
