Don’t you need to abolish the filibuster on changing Senate rules to abolish the filibuster on judicial nominees? I found this Norm Ornstein piece really interesting, and I’m sorry to say I just read it. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the filibuster question; I can see the points on both sides and generally favor up-or-down votes on judicial nominees. But setting a precedent that any Senate rule can be changed by a simple majority now strikes me as the core issue. Anyway – well worth reading. Money quote:
To get to a point where the Senate decides by majority that judicial filibusters are dilatory and/or unconstitutional, the Senate will have to do something it has never done before.
Richard Beth of the Congressional Research Service, in a detailed report on the options for changing Senate procedures, refers to it with typical understatement as “an extraordinary proceeding at variance with established procedure.”
To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation–debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say–regardless of the view held since the Senate’s beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents–they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority…
By invoking their self-described nuclear option without changing the rules, a Senate majority will effectively erase them. A new precedent will be in order–one making it easy and tempting to erase future filibusters on executive nominations and bills. Make no mistake about that.
The precedent set–a majority ignoring its own rules to override longstanding practice in one area–would almost inexorably make the Senate a mirror image of the House, moving the American system several steps closer to a plebiscitary model of government, and the Senate closer to the unfortunate House model of a cesspool of partisan rancor.
As a conservative of doubt, I’m worried.
The Dish 