Top budget expert makes case for minimum wage in reconciliation
In an analysis distributed Thursday, James Wallner, a former GOP aide who is a resident senior fellow at R Street, touched on the uncertainty of what would qualify as “merely incidental.”
Up to November 2016, he wrote, the Senate adjudicated 127 points of order or motions to waive them under the Byrd rule. But only 10 of those related to the “merely incidental” test.
As a result, Wallner wrote, “there are very few past precedents with which the Senate can inform its understanding of how to apply” the test. That, he said, means the presiding officer “has considerable discretion in enforcing the rule in ambiguous parliamentary situations.”
