McCain has brokered a filibuster compromise. Chait calls it a “a total victory for the Democrats”:
[T]he threat of the nuclear option has once again succeeded. Republicans threatened to change the Senate’s rules in 2005 to stop Democrats from filibustering their judges, and it succeeded — Democrats agreed to let pretty much any judges through with a majority vote. Once again the majority party forced the minority into a total capitulation. There is a lesson here, and it’s not that the Senate is a wonderfully congenial place whose rules must not be touched.
Ezra adds:
It’s clear now that Reid will change the rules if he believes it necessary. But so too will McConnell.
If Republicans retake the Senate in 2014 and the presidency in 2016, there’s no way Majority Leader McConnell will permit Democrats to routinely filibuster or otherwise obstruct President Christie’s nominees. If they do, he’ll throw Reid’s words back in their face and make the change Reid threatened to make today.
The result is that the minority’s ability to filibuster executive-branch nominees was weakened, even if it wasn’t fully eliminated. The minority can use the filibuster against particularly objectionable nominees that the majority isn’t overly committed to confirming. But they do so with the express indulgence of the majority. If the minority uses it too often, or chooses a nominee the majority really wants to confirm, the privilege of filibustering nominees — and that’s what it is now, a privilege granted by the majority — will be taken away. No majority is going to take that nuke off the table.
How Alec MacGillis understands the actions of Republican senators:
What gives? Why weren’t Republicans more willing to let him go nuclear? Doing so would’ve allowed them to glory in the moral high ground and, once they won back the Senate as seems quite possible in the next few years, seek righteous revenge by breaking the filibuster for purposes far more consequential than confirming nominees to a few second-tier departments.
Others have already noted one reason for Republicans to pull back from this outcome: they could already undo plenty of the Obama legacy with a mere 51 votes—via the budget reconciliation process, which could, for one thing, dograve damage to Obamacare. But I would suggest another theory: that Republicans pulled back, in part, precisely because of the likelihood of how things would play out in the full post-filibuster revenge scenario.
Earlier Dish on the filibuster stand-off here.
The Dish 