I think it's over and we 've been royally fucked. I will keep hoping until this thing is dead and buried and hopefully I am wrong. It doesn't seem likely though.

It's a gut punch. I am devastated.

I don't wish ill on the parliamentarian. She's doing the job she's been assigned to do and that job is to give legal advice on whether a piece of legislation comports with the parameters of the process they chose. Why wish ill of a person doing their job? And if we are honest, it's not that she's saying something that's way out there. Reconciliation was invented in order to make the passing of bills involving the budget. This is a wider matter.

Democrats chose reconciliation, because they didn't have 60 votes. They didn't have 60 votes even though there are more than 10 Republicans in the senate who would support immigration reform, but they don't because their party base doesn't want them to and if they do, they will suffer dearly. They bear share of the blame and so do their voters.

Democrats can pass legislation with 51 votes, but at least two of them will not vote to abolish the filibuster, probably because they don't want to take tough votes that will hunt them politically and because they can play up the idea they were bipartisan. It's a bad idea that stops all sorts of useful legislation, it's undemocratic as the US system already has too many veto points and if anything it stops bipartisan compromise. It sucks but that's the situation we 're in.

The decision to overrule the parliamentarian ultimately also requires 51 votes. The dynamic is similar to abolishing the filibuster. It's very hard to do.

Firing the parliamentarian is a fantasy. It doesn't take away her already made decisions and it doesn't do away with the office of the parliamentarian. The people working at the office aren't partisan hacks, they are career bureaucrats. Republicans did fire the parliamentarian in 2001 in a hissy fit, but that didn't change the decision that prompted the firing.

If I were a dreamer, I would still hold some hope. As Padilla said there's enormous pressure to do something on immigration and if they go down a more narrow path and legalizing dreamers is one of the least controversial things they can do.