(AP)
It's not a complete repeal of the filibuster: Supreme Court nominees can still be blocked by 41 senators, as can all legislation. But even this smaller rule change — a move known as the "nuclear option" — is a big break with precedent.
In all, 52 Democrats voted to change the filibuster rules, while all 45 Republicans and 3 Democrats opposed the move. (West Virginia's Joe Manchin, Michigan's Carl Levin, and Arkansas's Mark Pryor were the three dissenting Democrats.)
Reid pushed to change the rules after Republicans once again blocked the nomination of Patricia Millett to the U.S. Appeals Court for the Washington, D.C., Circuit. The Senate voted 57 to 43 to reconsider a vote on her nomination, but that wasn't enough to overcome a filibuster.
Once that happened, Reid went nuclear. He raised a point of order calling for a majority vote to move forward. The Senate parliamentarian ruled Reid's motion out of order. Reid then appealed the ruling, and 52 Democrats supported him. That vote, in effect, altered the Senate rules: A simple majority is now sufficient to cut off filibusters on nominations.
That maneuver, in itself, is a huge deal. In the past, a two-thirds majority has been required to change the Senate's rules in the middle of the session. The fact that Reid changed the rules with a simple majority sets a new precedent — that's why it's known as the "nuclear option."
Reid had threatened this maneuver before after growing frustrated by GOP filibusters, but each time, he backed down after Republicans agreed to let some nominations through. This time, there was no deal.
On the floor earlier on Thursday, Reid complained that Republicans have repeatedly blocked President Obama's judicial nominees and executive-branch appointments over the past five years. That includes Obama's three nominees to the important D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — Millett, Nina Pillard and Robert Wilkins — as well as executive-branch nominees like former Congressman Mel Watt, who was nominated to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
"In July, after obstructing dozens of executive nominees for months, and some for years, Republicans once again promised that they would end their unprecedented obstruction," Reid said. "One look at the Senate’s Executive Calendar shows nothing has changed since July." He pointed out that there are 75 executive-branch nominations currently in limbo, having waited an average of 140 days.
Republicans, for their part, warned that Democrats will come to regret changing the Senate's rules in this fashion — particularly if the GOP ends up retaking the chamber in the 2014 elections. “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Back in June, McConnell warned that if Reid changed the filibuster rules for executive-branch nominees, the filibuster would eventually die altogether. "There is not a doubt in my mind," he said, "that if the majority breaks the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate with regard to nominations, the next majority will do it for everything."
Further reading:
-- A brief history of the Senate filibuster fight.
-- Everything you need to know about the nominations fight.
Brad Plumer
covers energy and environmental issues, which ends up including just
about everything from climate change to agriculture to urban policy and
transportation. Follow him on Twitter at @bradplumer. Email him here.
Nine reasons the filibuster change is a huge deal
Goodbye, filibuster. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
3. The filibuster now exists in what you might call an unstable equilibrium. It theoretically forces a 60-vote threshold on important legislation. But it can — and now, in part, has —been undone with 51 votes. Its only protection was the perceived norm against using the 51-vote option. Democrats just blew that norm apart. The moment one party or the other filibusters a consequential and popular bill, that's likely the end of the filibuster, permanently.
4. The practical end of the Senate's 60-vote threshold is not plunging the chamber into new and uncharted territories. It's the omnipresence of the filibuster in recent decades that plunged the chamber into new and uncharted territories. At the founding of the Republic, the filibuster didn't exist. Prior to the 1970s, filibusters — which required 67 votes to break for most of the 20th century — were incredibly rare.
5. As Gregory Koger, a University of Miami political scientist who researches the filibuster, told me: “Over the last 50 years, we have added a new veto point in American politics. It used to be the House, the Senate and the president, and now it’s the House, the president, the Senate majority and the Senate minority. Now you need to get past four veto points to pass legislation. That’s a huge change of constitutional priorities. But it’s been done, almost unintentionally, through procedural strategies of party leaders.”
6. The rise of the filibuster and the death of the filibuster can be traced to the same fundamental cause: Party polarization. Before the two parties became reasonably unified and disciplined ideological combatants, filibusters were rarely used as a tactic of inter-party warfare because each political party had both members who supported and opposed the bills in question. As that era waned, the filibuster became constant because parties could agree on what to oppose. But that's also why the filibuster's days were (and are) numbered: The majority party agrees on what to support, and continual filibusters against those items increase the majority party's anger at the filibuster itself.
7. Republicans take a lot of the blame here. They've used the filibuster more aggressively than Democrats, by a wide margin. They've also been less willing to cooperate with Democrats on general legislative efforts, making the presence of the filibuster more costly to the Democratic Party. And they've been so unwilling to work with Democrats this year that they essentially removed all reason for Democrats to stay their hand. The way Senate Democrats saw it was that if they weren't going to get immigration reform or gun control or jobs bills or anything big that they cared about, then at least they would get their judicial and executive-branch nominations.
8. There's a lot of upside for Republicans in how this went down. It came at a time when Republicans control the House and are likely to do so for the duration of President Obama's second term, so the weakening of the filibuster will have no effect on the legislation Democrats can pass. The electoral map, the demographics of midterm elections, and the political problems bedeviling Democrats make it very likely that Mitch McConnell will be majority leader come 2015 and then he will be able to take advantage of a weakened filibuster. And, finally, if and when Republicans recapture the White House and decide to do away with the filibuster altogether, Democrats won't have much of an argument when they try to stop them.
9. With gun control dead, immigration reform on life support and bitter disagreement between the House and Senate proving the norm, it looked like the 113th Congress would be notably inconsequential. Today, it became notably consequential. It has changed how all congresses to come will work. Indeed, this might prove to be one of the most significant congresses in modern times. Today, the political system changed its rules to work more smoothly in an age of sharply polarized parties. If American politics is to avoid collapsing into complete dysfunction in the years to come, more changes like this one will likely be needed.
Ezra Klein
is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as
well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on
domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system
that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
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