What goes around comes around: Sometimes the cure is worst than the disease. - Democrats Rein In Senate Filibusters

From The Wall Street Journal:

A bitterly divided Senate voted Thursday to eliminate filibusters for most presidential nominees, a momentous and politically risky step that limits the ability of Republicans to block President Barack Obama's choices for executive-branch and most judicial posts.

The change gives Mr. Obama more flexibility to shape the federal judiciary and to staff his administration for the remaining years of his presidency. But it could hand more power to Republicans if the GOP should win the White House and control of the Senate.

 

The rule change allows nominations to proceed with a simple majority, or 51 votes when all senators are present, down from the three-fifths threshold, generally 60 votes, that had long applied when opponents filibustered—or threatened to talk at length. The change would apply to all executive-branch and most judicial nominations, but not to nominations to the Supreme Court or to legislation [for now I might add].

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) engineered the rules change, over Republican objections, with a complicated parliamentary maneuver so controversial that it is often called the "nuclear option."

 

"The American people believe Congress is broken. The American people believe the Senate is broken,'' said Mr. Reid. "It's time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete."

 

The result, a major change in how the Senate has operated for decades, is the culmination of accelerating partisanship in Washington and mounting frustration among Democrats in the face of GOP delaying tactics during the Obama years. The rule change could alter the balance of power in the current Congress by stripping Republicans of a lever for extracting concessions from Democrats.

 

In the future, if the same party controlled the White House and the Senate, as Democrats do now, presidents would have greater latitude to pick more-ideological nominees because they will not have to build support among the minority party.

 

The vote was a landmark moment for the Senate, a tradition-bound institution that is slow to change and prides itself on giving power to the minority party.

 

Republicans warned that Democrats had crushed any vestige of goodwill that might have produced bipartisan cooperation in other areas, such as the budget and immigration overhaul.

 

Mr. Obama, as a senator in the minority, had opposed the rule change when Republicans were considering it. He said neither party should "change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet." Under such a change, "the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse."

 

The sour feelings created by Thursday's move may affect unrelated issues before Congress, several people predicted, such as attempts to find common ground on the budget and an immigration-law overhaul.

 

"It grossly complicates and adds another level of emotion to an already emotional debate between Democrats and Republicans, particularly on anything to do with taxes and spending," said Stan Collender, who worked for Democrats on the House and Senate budget committees.