Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough issued a ruling on Friday that quietly ruined Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Memorial Day weekend. It’s very difficult to explain, and I don’t want to put you to sleep so I’ll just give you the broadest outlines.

So long as there is a 60 vote requirement to overcome a filibuster on Senate legislation, the Biden administration cannot enact any of its agenda. The Senate is currently split 50-50, with vice-president Kamala Harris breaking ties on the floor (but not in committee). The workaround is to use the budget reconciliation process which allows legislation to pass on 51-50 votes, and that’s what was done on the COVID-19 relief package. In that case, the budget in question was for 2021 and it worked for a simple reason.

The Budget Committee was supposed to have provided a budget outline for 2021 by April 1, 2020, but that never happened. This allowed the new chairman, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, to use a forcing mechanism to get the budget out of his evenly-divided committee and onto the Senate floor. Basically, if the Budget Committee doesn’t meet its deadline for any reason, it can still send up a budget.

The Friday ruling from parliamentarian MacDonough stated, however, that revisions to the 2021 budget are allowable but that there is no forcing mechanism attached to them. In other words, if the Democrats want to do another budget reconciliation bill based on the 2021 budget, they’ll need at least one Republican member of the Budget Committee to sign off on it.

The Democrats can still use the 2022 budget this year to get another big reconciliation package past the filibuster, but that’s only one bite at the apple. Schumer was hoping to have several bites. His original idea was to make a couple of revisions to the 2021 budget and then at least another to the 2022 budget.

What this means is that everything that Biden wants passed this year that can’t get 10 Republican votes is going to have to be in one big package. And that pretty much blows up all of Schumer’s plans.

The bombshell ruling effectively means Senate Majority LeaderCharles Schumer (D-N.Y.) will be able to use only one more reconciliation vehicle to pass Biden’s key legislative priorities this year. He will not be able to divide up the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, as well as Biden’s calls to expand Medicare and lower the price of prescription drugs, into multiple reconciliation packages, as was envisioned only a few weeks ago.

To be clear, I actually agree with the ruling. Its reasoning is unassailable.

The parliamentarian warned that allowing for automatic discharge of revisions to the budget resolution out of the Budget Committee and onto the floor would risk “eroding the budget process,” characterizing it as a scenario in which the budget panel would be churning out “meaningless, stop-gap measures or shells for future consideration.”

“That kind of chaos was not at all what was intended with auto-discharge. Rather, the purpose of auto-discharge is to provide an incentive for committee compliance with the law and to provide a remedy when compliance with and through the mandatory processes of the [Congressional Budget Act] have not been met,” she wrote.

“Auto-discharge is not appropriate for a 304 resolution,” MacDonough wrote in conclusion.

It’s disappointing that MacDonough wasn’t clear about this back in April when she appeared to side with Schumer, telling him “that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions” and seemingly green-lighting his plans. But I guess if you don’t think to ask all the right questions, you won’t get all the answers you need. Schumer is still allowed to proceed with his plan, he just needs one Republican on the Budget Committee to go along with it, and that will never happen.

This creates a migraine so agonizing that it will take time to unwrap all the consequences and the way forward, but there’s little doubt that it will greatly reduce what Biden can accomplish and complicate the process of getting what remains. For starters, it means that Vox was wrong when they stated in April that the infrastructure bill might pass using a revision to the 2021 budget. This means that the bill must be part of the 2022 budget, which hasn’t yet passed in either chamber of Congress. In fact, Congress only received the Biden administration’s 2022 budget request on May 28, although they got the topline numbers on April 9th.

In a narrow sense, this is also a problem that filibuster reform wouldn’t fix. With committee membership split 50-50, and the vice-president unavailable to break ties, the budget cannot be revised without minority party consent. On the other hand, the budget reconciliation process is mainly useful for allowing 50+1 votes to succeed on the floor of the Senate. If all votes succeed at 50+1, then reconciliation goes back to its original purpose which is to adjust the budget when the need arises.

The ruling cuts both ways when it comes to the filibuster. It makes finding bipartisan support for legislation more urgent, but it also makes it harder for filibuster supporters like Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to have a safety valve when bipartisan efforts fail. It also removes a lot of time from the clock, meaning that the Democrats can’t wait around to see if Manchin can strike deals.

All-in-all, it was the correct ruling but not the ruling the country needs right now. We need a way around Republican obstruction, and this just gave them more power.