For Senate rules arbiter, wage case latest minefield
Obscure figure to play outsized role in fate of $15 push
WASHINGTON — She’s guided the Senate through two impeachment trials, vexed Democrats and Republicans alike with parliamentary opinions and helped rescue Electoral College certificates from a pro-Trump mob ransacking the Capitol. She also does spot-on impersonations of senators including Bernie Sanders.
Elizabeth MacDonough, an English literature major and the Senate’s first woman parliamentarian, is about to demonstrate anew why she’s one of Washington’s most potent, respected yet obscure figures. Any day, she’s expected to reveal if she thinks a federal minimum wage boost, progressives’ most prized plank in Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan, should fall from the bill.
Her decision, a political minefield likely to elicit groans from whichever side she disappoints, will play an outsized role in deciding the wage increase’s fate. It may not be definitive — majority Democrats might try overriding an opinion they don’t like.
“Elizabeth has a soul-crushing job, to which she brings an enormous amount of soul,” said her predecessor, Alan Frumin, whom she replaced when he retired in 2012.
Part of MacDonough’s job, in which she’s supposed to be nonpartisan, is enduring high-stakes lobbying from both parties when she’s making pivotal decisions. But she’s found a home in the Capitol, where she’s spent most of the past three decades after starting as an assistant Senate librarian in 1990.
“She knows the names of every police officer and janitor,” Frumin said.
Sometimes, the pressure can be extraordinary. Frumin said that when the Senate was enacting former President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care law — which was opposed by Republicans and infuriated grassroots tea party conservatives — he had police protection at his home as a precaution.
“And the political climate hasn’t gotten friendlier,” he said.
Even so, MacDonough, 55, has garnered high marks from both parties. Underscoring that, while she was initially appointed in 2012 by Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada, Senate majority leader at the time, she was retained by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., when he became majority leader in 2015.
“She’s very solid. She listens to all the evidence,” Sanders, the independent Vermont senator and chief sponsor of the minimum wage proposal, said in a recent interview.
“She is a brilliant lawyer, a thorough and fair referee and a walking encyclopedia of Senate precedent and procedure,” McConnell spokesman David Popp said Tuesday.
MacDonough has earned her reputation for fairness while helping steer the Senate through some of its highest-profile moments. Rulings she issued striking anti-abortion and other provisions from numerous failed GOP attempts to repeal Obama’s health care law weakened their bills.
She helped Chief Justice John Roberts preside over then-President Donald Trump’s 2020 Senate impeachment trial, and was beside Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., for Trump’s second trial this month. Trump was acquitted both times.
And as Trump supporters fought past police and into the Capitol last month
in hopes of disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, MacDonough and other staffers rescued those ballots and hustled mahogany boxes containing them to safety. MacDonough’s office, on the Capitol’s first floor, was ransacked and declared a crime scene.
Raised by a single mother in the comfortable Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, MacDonough graduated with an English literature degree from George Washington University. She began her Senate career in its library before leaving to get a law degree at Vermont Law School.
She worked briefly as a
Justice Department trial attorney before returning to the Senate in 1999, this time as an assistant in the parliamentarian’s office.
As Democrats begin pushing Biden’s sweeping relief package through Congress, they’re using a special procedure that shields the bill from Senate Republican filibusters, which require 60 votes to thwart. That’s out of reach for Democrats in a 50-50 chamber they control with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
But Senate rules require that items in such a bill must have a substantial budget impact that is not “merely incidental” to the language’s main intended purpose.
MacDonough has been meeting with Democrats who’ve tried persuading her that their minimum wage provision meets that test, and Republicans who’ve told her it doesn’t. Democrats want to raise the federal floor, fixed at $7.25 hourly since 2009, to $15 over five years.
If MacDonough says it should be stricken, Democrats would have no chance of garnering 60 votes to overrule her. But they might choose the rarely utilized tactic of having the presiding officer, presumably Harris, ignore her and announce that the minimum wage language meets the test to stay in the overall legislation.
BEIJING — China’s Communist Party already wields outsized influence over Hong Kong’s political landscape. Its allies have long controlled a committee that handpicks the territory’s leader. Its loyalists dominate the Hong Kong legislature. It ousted four of the city’s elected opposition lawmakers last year.
China plans to impose restrictions on Hong Kong’s electoral system to root out candidates the Communist Party deems disloyal, a move that could block democracy advocates in the city from running for any elected office.
The planned overhaul reinforces the Communist Party’s resolve to quash the few remaining vestiges of dissent after the anti-government protests that roiled the territory in 2019. It also builds on a national security law for the city that Beijing enacted last summer, giving the authorities sweeping powers to target dissent.
Collectively, those efforts are transforming Hong Kong’s freewheeling, often messy partial democracy into a political system more closely resembling mainland China’s authoritarian system, which demands almost total obedience.
“In our country where socialist democracy is practiced, political dissent is allowed, but there is a red line here,” Xia Baolong, China’s director of Hong Kong and Macao affairs, said Monday in a strongly worded speech that outlined Beijing’s intentions. “It must not be allowed to damage the fundamental system of the country — that is, damage the leadership of the Communist Party of China.”
The central government wants Hong Kong to be run by “patriots,” Xia said, and will not let the Hong Kong government rewrite the territory’s laws, as previously expected, but will do so itself.
Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, affirmed the broad strokes of the plan, saying Tuesday that many years of intermittent protests over Hong Kong’s political future had forced the government to act.
When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the territory was promised a high degree of autonomy, in addition to the preservation of its capitalist economic system and the rule of law.
But in the decades since, many among the city’s 7.5 million residents have grown wary of Beijing’s encroachment on their freedoms and unfulfilled promises of universal suffrage.
These tensions escalated in 2019 when masses of Hong Kong residents took to the streets in protests for months, calling in part for universal suffrage. They also delivered a striking rebuke of Beijing by handing pro-democracy candidates a stunning victory in local district elections that had long been dominated by the establishment.
The latest planned overhaul seeks to prevent such electoral upsets and, more important, would also give Beijing a much tighter grip on the 1,200-member committee that will decide early next year who will be the city’s chief executive for the next five years.
Dear Amy: My daughter is toxic. She and her husband live with me, but with my help of a hefty down payment they will soon be moving out. I am looking forward to their absence.
My abrasive daughter tends to get angry and then cut out whomever she thinks offended her.
My elderly mother (94) and myself, at least some of the time, get caught in the crossfire, and then she will stop speaking to us for weeks at a time.
Recently, however, her angry behavior escalated. She knocked me to the floor. Although I wasn’t injured, I was shocked.
I believe she needs therapy to deal with her outsized anger. I spoke to her about it. Not surprisingly, it turned into an argument.
Her husband is a nice person, but he is cowed by her furious temper.
When my daughter takes offense, she inflates the issue to gargantuan proportions, adds it to a litany of former insults, and believes she is the victim. She does not tolerate any disagreements (no matter how small), and when she argues, she tears her opponent to shreds with every imaginable insult.
The strategies that are not effective include tiptoeing around, agreeing (thereby fueling the rage), apologizing (which justifies her feeling offended), trying to provide insight into the insignificance of the problem, trying to be understanding, or trying to ignore it. Have any ideas?
— Mother
Dear Mother: Yes, your daughter needs help. I could speculate about what is going on with her, but she should be seen by a physician and a mental health professional for an assessment. Will she submit to this? Probably not, because one aspect of her malady, temperament and personality is that she cannot admit that she has a problem or that she is a problem.
However, I’m most concerned about you and your 94-year-old mother, and in my opinion, you should be concerned, too.
If your daughter ever threatens or physically harms you or anyone else in the household, you should call the police, and she should leave the household immediately.
She has a history of initiating arguments and then declaring estrangements.
This tendency could ultimately protect you, but if this escalates and she won’t keep her distance, you should file a restraining order.
You may have to love her from a distance. Unfortunately, you cannot protect her husband, but you can hope that he will find ways to protect himself.
Dear Amy: I am a woman in my 40s, and my father’s captive “pal.”
My older brothers live in other states. I live 30 minutes from my parents, who still have “empty nest syndrome.”
My father calls me his “pal,” and we go fishing or to car shows and things like that. However, when he wants to pull rank on me, he is overbearing.
I get tired of switching gears and walking on eggshells.
Last month, he was in my apartment and saw a prescription bottle for medication and relentlessly demanded to know what it was for. A few weeks ago, I helped him work on a project and he decided to badger me about going to church.
How can I get him to ease up on me and make some friends of his own?
— Tired
Dear Tired: It is unlikely that (at his age) your father will change. You can, however. Dealing with aging parents is a dance. Boundaries should be drawn and maintained, but tolerance is also called for.
Let him know that if he wants you to be his “pal,” you’d like him to treat you like one.
Dear Amy: I am disgusted that you endorsed “polyamory” in your column! Marriage is between two people. Period.
— Disgusted
Dear Disgusted: I did not endorse polyamory; I published a question about polyamory and quoted an expert in my response.
I personally believe that polyamory is not an optimal family system for children (too many people/parents, potentially creating too much drama), but when it comes to how adults conduct their own relationships, I see polyamory as a relationship choice and try not to judge how consenting adults choose to live.
Edward R. Daughaday, a retired Baltimore County police officer and
World War II Navy veteran, died
Feb. 2 at Gilchrist Center Towson of complications from a stroke. The
Mays Chapel North resident was 96.
Edward Royston Daughaday, son of William Edward Daughaday, an executive with the Boyertown
Casket Co., and his wife, Alma Hopkins Erdman Daughaday, a schoolteacher, was born in Baltimore and raised on Seymour Avenue in Raspeburg, which was then part of Baltimore County.
The area is now known as Hamilton and is in the city.
The Daughaday (pronounced DAW-day) family has roots in Maryland that date back 300 years. Records from 1730 state that family members lived on Hillen Road on land that today is the Mount Pleasant Golf Course. Originally Quakers, they married into the Taylor family for whom Taylor Avenue is named, and converted to Methodism.
Mr. Daughaday attended City College and three weeks before his graduation in 1942 dropped out and enlisted in the Navy. A petty officer, he served as a sonar operator aboard a destroyer in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean theaters until being discharged in 1948.
“He was 80 when he received his City College diploma in 2004,” said his daughter, Cynthia Ann Jacobson of Charlottesville, Virginia.
While working as a night-shift security guard for Bendix Radio on East Joppa Road in Towson, he met and fell in love with another Bendix employee, the former Eileen Kathleen Einig, a coil winder in the radio department.
“He would write little love notes and leave them for her to find at her work station the next morning,” his daughter said.
The couple married in 1952 and moved into a home on Warren Road in Cockeysville. In 1965, his wife died, leaving Mr. Daughaday to raise two young children. In 1968, he married Cynthia Mildred Green Winterling. The marriage ended in divorce.
In 1955, he joined the Baltimore County Police Department, where he served for 20 years as a foot patrolman assigned to Precinct 6 in Towson until retiring in 1975. He then went to work for the state as chief bailiff for the District Court of Maryland and was assigned to the courthouse in Towson. He retired a second time in 1985.
An expert model maker, Mr. Daughaday, who moved to Mays Chapel North in 2001, specialized in making museum-quality wooden models of Chesapeake Bay ships and boats, some of which could take up to a year to finish.
He was a member of Mays Chapel United Methodist Church and was a 32º Mason. Services were private.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Daughaday is survived by a son, Michael Daughaday of Taneytown; two stepdaughters, Theresa Mace of Parkville and Debbie Shea of Taneytown; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.