Senate Nuclear Option Expedient But Unwise

Recently, the Democrats in the United States Senate under the leadership of Harry Reid expressed their determination to change the Senate rules on dealing with the President's nominations and eliminate filibusters, effectively ending the supermajority 60-vote prerequisite and allowing the nominations to be confirmed with a simple 51-vote majority.  The Republicans, for their part, cried foul and claimed that it would destroy the Senate as a deliberative body that, unlike the House of Representatives, accorded the minority party a degree of participation in the crafting of legislation.  Of course, the planned rule change wouldn't have applied to legislation, just nominations. The current Democratic administration claims its nominations are needlessly being held up by the Republicans under their leader Mitch McConnell.  Got all that?

Good, because just eight years ago the two parties were completely switched regarding their rules when it was the Republicans who were calling for a change.  They (including Senator McConnell) approvingly called it the "Constitutional Option" while Democratic opponents (including Senator Reid) denounced it as the "Nuclear Option".  It was nothing but comical the other day on C-Span as this station played clips of the pro and con senators back in 2005 expressing diametrically opposite opinions on this issue than they have today.  As it turns out, neither party exercised their threatened rule change.  Whew!

It never ceases to tickle me how whichever political party that happens to find itself in power seems to have the idea that they will ALWAYS remain in power and that those guys on the other side of the aisle won't someday put THEM in the minority.  As Tennessee's Republican Senator Lamar Alexander pointed out, changing the rule now may benefit the Democrats, but in a few years we may have a Republican president with control of both houses of Congress.  If that happens, those Democrats would rue the day they expediently changed the rules just to get a few nominees confirmed as we end up with some possibly "far out" characters confirmed to their posts...