We didn’t start the fire – Harry Reid did.
Unleashing what is known as the “nuclear option,” Senate Democrats led by current majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) ended the Republican minority’s ability to use filibusters to delay or block President Barack Obama’s nominations for judicial and executive positions. With only three Democrats joining Republicans in dissent, the 52-48 vote moved the threshold for authorizing a nomination from 60 votes down to a simple majority of 51 votes. Currently, the Senate is composed of 53 Democrats and 45 Republicans, in addition to two Independents who usually vote along the Democrat party line.
Following the vote – which Republicans decried as a crushing blow to the Senate’s purpose as a safeguard of minority interests – Democrats hurriedly ended a filibuster against one of the president’s nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Republicans have called this unexpected amendment to parliamentary procedures an enormous power grab and a simultaneous attempt to divert criticism from the abject failures of the Obamacare rollout. Democrats, on the other hand, criticized Republican parliamentary roadblocks as excessive and unreasonable, aimed more at political strong-arming than bipartisan cohesiveness.
Of the change in procedures that have been in place for thirty years, Obama was quoted as saying “A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal.”
In response to the Democrats’ parliamentary silencer, a fuming Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warned Democrats (and possibly Reid personally):
“You’ll regret this and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think…the Democratic playbook of broken promises, double standards and raw power – the same playbook that got us Obamacare – has to end. It may take the American people to end it, but it has to end.”
In 2005, Republicans threatened the nuclear option to prevent Democrats from filibustering President Bush’s judicial nominations, but a bipartisan group of 14 senators brought the two sides to compromise.
At the time, Obama was a senator – he opposed the nuclear option.
