Video: It's more than just a rule change: The so-called "nuclear option" will fundamentally alter the way the Senate operates - for good.
Senate Democrats took the dramatic step Thursday of eliminating filibusters for most nominations by presidents, a power play they said was necessary to fix a broken system but one that Republicans said will only rupture it further.
Democrats used a rare parliamentary move to change the rules so that federal judicial nominees and executive-office appointments can advance to confirmation votes by a simple majority of senators, rather than the 60-vote supermajority that has been the standard for nearly four decades.
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This is what happened in the Senate Thursday
Confused by terms like filibuster and cloture, and looking for some clarity? We hope this will help.
The immediate rationale for the move was to allow the confirmation of three picks by President Obama to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — the most recent examples of what Democrats have long considered unreasonably partisan obstruction by Republicans.
In the long term, the rule change represents a substantial power shift in a chamber that for more than two centuries has prided itself on affording more rights to the minority party than any other legislative body in the world. Now, a president whose party holds the majority in the Senate is virtually assured of having his nominees approved, with far less opportunity for political obstruction.
The main combatants Thursday were the chamber’s two chiefs, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who have clashed for several years over Republican filibusters of Obama’s agenda and nominees.
Reid said the chamber “must evolve” beyond parliamentary roadblocks. “The American people believe the Senate is broken, and I believe the American people are right,” he said, adding: “It’s time to get the Senate working again.”
McConnell linked the rule change to the methods used to approve Obama’s health-care law solely with Democratic votes. The normally reserved GOP leader paced at his desk during his speech, often turning his back to Democrats to address only his fellow Republicans.
“It’s a sad day in the history of the Senate,” McConnell told reporters, calling the move a Democratic “power grab.”
The clash ended with a vote nearly as partisan as the times — 52 to 48, with all but three Democrats backing the move and every Republican opposing it.
The vote was the culmination of more than 25 years of feuding over nominations, beginning with President Ronald Reagan’s choices for the Supreme Court and including Obama’s picks for obscure federal regulatory agencies. Each side in Thursday’s debate cited its own statistics to state its case.
Democrats said the attempted filibusters of Chuck Hagel during his confirmation hearing to become defense secretary, a first for any nominee to lead the Pentagon — as well as a blockade of picks to head the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — exceeded anything Democrats did when they were in the minority. In addition, Democrats charged that Republicans didn’t even have substantive objections to the D.C. Circuit nominees they filibustered.
After the vote, Obama told reporters at the White House that Republicans had turned nomination fights into a “reckless and relentless tool” to grind the gears of government to a halt and noted that “neither party has been blameless for these tactics.” However, he said, “today’s pattern of obstruction . . . just isn’t normal; it’s not what our founders envisioned.”
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