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Adult Babies React as Expected When Favorite Toy Taken Away

Harry Reid

So the Senate minority is no longer able to filibuster the nominations of all executive and judicial branch appointees for shits and giggles anymore. No longer, to use the most recent example, can it block votes on three judges appointed to a circuit court because, as the excuse went, the court doesn’t have enough work to do. Nor can the minority block the filling of slots to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Labor Relations Board simply because it is ideologically opposed to the existence of those agencies.

Now, if there actually is a problem with some nominee, that nominee can simply be voted down by receiving fewer than 50 votes. Because, hey, we’re just talking nominees to some bureaucracy or another here. We’re not talking legislation. Yet.

Still, the move deprives the current pyromaniac adult-children who comprise the Senate Republican minority of one of their favorite sources of fire. Even if it’s not that big of a deal, the withdrawal, certainly at first, is going to lead to some outsized emotional responses.

Senator John McCain, who’s carved a role in the last decade as the hero who swoops in at the last minute to prevent such “nuclear” changes from occurring, only to fail this time, said, “Now there are no rules in the United States Senate.” No rules! Simple commoners can now walk around the Senate floor with no pants on listening to the devil’s rock ‘n’ roll music, going potty in the Senate president’s chair. Everyone can murder everyone now in the Senate, legally, because there are no rules. It is a state of nature. Bring a sharp spear if ever you near this once-hallowed chamber.

One can also appreciate the way Republicans try to link this move to the very unrelated topic of the troubled Obamacare rollout. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and others repeatedly claimed that Democrats were picking this fight over nominations to distract from the problems with Obamacare. Well, if Democrats were thinking that, it would be a fairly myopic strategy. More likely, they were bringing this about because they got tired of every vote on every appointment being blocked for no reason.

Here’s Senator Lamar Alexander stretching this into a screenplay session for the gore film Obamacare II: The Senate Rules Adjustment In Response To An Abuse Of Parliamentary Norms:

This action today creates a perpetual opportunity for the tyranny of the majority because it permits a majority in this body to do whatever it wants to do any time it wants to do it. This should be called Obamacare II, because it is another example of the use of raw partisan political party for the majority to do whatever it wants to do any time it wants to do it.

And then there’s Senator David Vitter, whom one might label a terrible person. He is genuinely scared for his country!

Rather than fix the Obamacare disaster, today Harry Reid doubled down on the brass knuckles partisan power politics that produced it—jam it through, no compromise, unilaterally make up new rules whenever needed. This isn’t just a shame for the Senate; it’s scary and dictatorial for our country.

The basis for these freakouts is that now Democrats have set a precedent that any Senate rule can be changed by simple-majority vote now. But doesn’t that deny The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body of a certain agency in deciding whether to change a rule? Because Harry Reid and Senate Democrats didn’t change the rules as much as they could’ve yesterday: they left in place the most important blocking procedure, the filibuster on legislation. (In my opinion, not shared by all, that’s a good thing.)

So there is still a powerful check, or precedent, left in place by the Democrats yesterday: that the majority wouldn’t change any rule that they couldn’t live with if they were in the minority. Given the way filibusters of nominations have been abused over the last several congresses, they decided that it’s worth it to allow the president of either party to get up-or-down votes on their nominees. This may suck for a future Senate Democratic minority when the next John Bolton is nominated by a Republican president for the diplomatic corps, but it’s something they’d be able to live with. Losing the right to filibuster a future repeal of the Affordable Care Act or sweeping “entitlement reform,” though? Not so much.