On Thursday, Harry Reid is expected to ask his caucus to weigh in about invoking the nuclear option to change the Senate rules to stop the ability of the Republicans to filibuster President Obama’s executive and judicial appointments. This is after Reid agreed to a very weak fix to the filibuster rules with McConnell back in January, a weak fix that McConnell proceeded to regularly violate:
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, frustrated by a dysfunctional and unpopular Congress that has been unable to perform basic tasks such as agreeing on a federal budget, may soon seek an unprecedented rules change in the Senate.
The Nevada Democrat’s aim would be to strip Republicans of their ability to stop President Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees with procedural roadblocks known as filibusters, which also have been used to halt much of the president’s legislative agenda.
This would ONLY be for personnel nominations, the filibuster would stay for legislation. John McCain is quoted in this article as being very worried about this change, while being completely complicit in the filibusters that have kept the Senate as dysfunctional as it is. Mitch McConnell is on record elsewhere as feeling very victimized by this action and threatening to change the filibuster rules for everything if the GOP ever gets control of the Senate. Which seems fine to me. The Dems aren’t especially good at the obstruction part and quickly cave in when editorial pages start calling them to task over it.
But we went through this in January, when for a few days it looked like real structural changes would happen. Instead, Harry Reid expected to be able to abide by a handshake deal with McConnell. A thing many people noted at the time was incredibly stupid.
So what do you think? If the GOP filibuster the next couple of nominations (and that looks like it could be Gina McCarthy for the EPA, Thomas Perez for Secretary of the Labor Department and Richard Cordray as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, plus 3 possible spots on the NLRB), will Harry Reid invoke the nuclear option and change the filibuster rules?