The parliamentarian stripped partial repeal of the National Firearms Act (NFA) from the budget bill early this morning. She probably won’t be overruled by the Vice President or fired by the Majority Leader.

The Senate is still working its way through the massive Republican budget bill, and the Parliamentarian has already stripped out several substantial provisions, as happens with most reconciliation bills. She has now done the same to the NFA section, and some gun-rights activists and Republicans are calling on leadership to go nuclear in response.

That’s very unlikely to happen for a number of reasons.

The most straightforward is simply that Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) has already ruled out the possibility multiple times this year. In fact, he did so again this week.

“That would not be a good outcome for getting a bill done,” he told The Washington Examiner on Thursday.

That’s unlikely to quell the calls by some gun-rights activists to ignore or replace the parliamentarian. Even some Republican Senators are calling for the same thing.

“The Parliamentarian is trying to UNDERMINE the President’s mandate and should be fired,” Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville posted on Thursday.

It’s not hard to understand the motivation for overruling or firing the parliamentarian. She decides what gets into the budget reconciliation bill and what doesn’t. That determines what can pass the Senate with 50 votes and what needs 60, which decides the fate of most provisions in the bill.

But it’s also important to understand the context this is all happening in and how it has happened many times before. Practically every time there’s a reconciliation bill, there are also attacks on the parliamentarian. In 2021, progressive Democrats wanted the Senate to overrule the parliamentarian‘s decision to strip a $15 minimum wage and a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants out of the budget bill. In 2017, Texas Senator Ted Cruz called on her decision to pare down what could be done to the Obamacare individual mandate through reconciliation to be overruled.

The current parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, survived both of those skirmishes. She’s been serving in the position since 2012. She’s just the sixth Senate parliamentarian since the position was created in 1935.

The position is one that’s generally held for decades and doesn’t usually change hands just because the Senate changes parties. In fact, only one parliamentarian has ever been fired. 24 years ago, Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott fired Robert Dove, who was previously appointed by a Republican Majority Leader, over his reconciliation decisions. But that move was poorly received and he ended up replacing him with Alan S. Frumin, who previously served in the role under a Democratic Majority Leader.

While the Majority Leader can fire the parliamentarian or the Vice President can overrule their decisions, there are good reasons that’s happened so rarely. It all has to do with the filibuster. Since reconciliation is a special Senate process designed to allow budget bills to avoid the 60-vote filibuster threshold–but only budget bills. So, the process is designed to root out anything that doesn’t primarily have a budget impact.

In other words, the process is designed to protect the legislative filibuster.

The parliamentarian’s primary job is to ensure that provisions included in the reconciliation don’t create new precedents that lower the vote threshold for implementing new kinds of policies with just 50 votes. Anything done in this reconciliation practice is generally fair game for the next one. Senators are keenly aware of the stakes of that.

To many in the Senate, firing or overruling the parliamentarian during reconciliation is akin to ending the filibuster. If you can nuke the parliamentarian on one question in this process, you can nuke them on any. What goes around comes around, or so the thinking goes.

We, of course, saw this play out with the judicial filibuster. Democrats decided to blow it up for lower court judges during the Obama Administration. Republicans went the next step and eliminated it for Supreme Court appointees during the first Trump Administration.

Plus, there are other avenues to get all or most of what Republicans want through the process, even after the parliamentarian has ruled a provision isn’t primarily budgetary in nature and, therefore, doesn’t comply with the Byrd Rule. They can, and already several times have, rewrite and rerun the provision after consulting with the parliamentarian. This just happened yesterday with the provision dealing with cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Now, maybe the parliamentarian will make enough consequential decisions that anger enough Republicans to make Thune change his mind. Maybe they’ll calculate that Democrats are bound to break the rules once they get back in power, and they might as well do it first to get everything they want.

But the NFA provisions, while relatively uncontroversial in the caucus, are unlikely to be the reason any of that goes down. If it happens, it’ll likely be over something that the entire caucus believes is pressing enough that getting it is worth risking never being able to block another piece of legislation while in the minority again.

Tuberville wasn’t complaining about the NFA provisions when he called for her ouster, and the budget bill is being jammed up by issues that have gotten much more attention and garner more interparty controversy, like cutting Medicaid benefits and state and local tax deductions.

It’s always possible Republicans decide to make a move on the parliamentarian. Both parties have flirted with, and even followed through in limited ways on, dismantling the filibuster in recent years. The rise of hyperpartisanship has severely damaged trust across the aisle in everyday life and in the Senate.

Still, Democrats ultimately didn’t nuke the legislative filibuster in the last Congress, despite considerable pressure to do so. It’s likely the institutionalists still have power over the partisans when it comes to the Senate rules. And it’s unlikely the NFA provisions are going to be the tipping point.