Outgoing Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who oversaw a filibuster reform in 2013 that has broken a Republican blockade on many judicial and executive branch nominees, tells The New York Times' Carl Hulse it's time to go further.
“Unless after this election there is a dramatic change to go back to the way it used to be, the Senate will have to evolve as it has in the past,” Mr. Reid told me, referring to a former tradition of rarely mounting filibusters. “But it will evolve with a majority vote determining stuff. It is going to happen.” […]
[H]e is the first to publicly express what other lawmakers and aides have talked about more quietly: the possibility that Democrats will take drastic action if they are triumphant at the polls only to be blocked by the gridlock that has plagued Washington in a new Clinton administration.
“What choice would Democrats have?” asked Mr. Reid, who lamented the inability of a stalemated Congress to take on big issues. “The country can’t be run this way, where nothing gets done.”
There's little question that, with Mitch McConnell leading Republicans and the House likely to stay in Republican hands, the only way a President Clinton will accomplish anything is with a Democratic majority in the Senate that can make the body actually work. That would, as Hulse writes "provoke a furious partisan fight."
But it's a fight that has to happen if we're going to have three functioning branches of government. There's no question McConnell will find more creative reasons for blocking Clinton nominees and very little chance he'll allow any legislative accomplishments that will help her or Democrats in 2018 and 2020. Yes, there's also a chance that Republicans will retake the Senate in 2018 and have the advantage of not having to fight filibusters, but with a Democratic president there's little help for them in that. So far, the incoming leader of the Senate Democrats—Chuck Schumer—isn't ruling anything out.
At the very least, Republicans have to go into the next Congress, and the next presidential administration, knowing that Democrats will be willing to take the filibuster away from them if they don't stop their blockades and start acting like an actual, responsible opposition party. But for this to work, we need a Senate Democratic majority.
Can you pitch in $1 today to each of our Democratic challengers to turn the Senate blue?