SEN REID D NV Majority leader has finally heard the American people's outrage and has gone nuclear. The repiglicans and tea-baggers have brought this on themselves, the endless, baseless, mind numbing filibusters that have stalled presidential nominations just because they oppose everything Pres Obama wants to do. The operation of the federal government has suffered because of this and rather to continue the gridlock in the Senate the gop / tea-bagger obstructionist forced Sen Reid's hand. From the Washington Post's Wonkblog....
That's it. The Senate finally went nuclear.
(AP)
A majority of Democrats voted on Thursday to modify the Senate's
rules on filibusters for the first time since 1975. From now on,
judicial nominees to federal courts can be confirmed by a simple
majority vote. So can the president's executive-branch nominations.
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.
1. The change the Senate made today is small but consequential: The
filibuster no longer applies to judicial or executive-branch nominees.
It still applies to bills and Supreme Court nominations.
Goodbye, filibuster. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
2. Well, technically it still applies to all bills and Supreme Court
nominations. In practice, legislation that mainly uses the government's
tax and spending powers can evade the filibuster using the budget
reconciliation procedures. That's how George W. Bush's tax cuts passed,
and how Obamacare was finished. As for the Supreme Court, it's very hard
to believe that Democrats or Republicans would accept filibusters of
qualified Supreme Court nominees, either. And, as Democrats proved
today, they don't have to.
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.
