It took Harry Reid a lot of convincing by activists that getting rid of the filibuster was a worthy goal. But it was, he insists in a farewell interview in Politico, and he doesn't regret it. Furthermore, it needs to continue to be whittled away, he says.
“I don’t know if it’s my biggest achievement, but I’m satisfied we did it. We had to. Look at why it was done,” said Reid, who turned 77 this month. “We got almost 100 judges approved … we saved the integrity of different agencies of government. No, think of what our country would’ve been without that.”
Reid predicted that the 60-vote filibuster threshold for legislation and for Supreme Court nominees will ultimately disappear altogether—calling it a natural evolution of the chamber.
The rules are “going to erode, it’s just a question of when,” Reid said. “You can’t have a democracy decided by 60 out of 100, and that’s why changing the rules is one of the best things that has happened to America in a long time. It’s good for us, it’s good for them.”
He's right, and filibuster reform will continue to be something we fight for. That's not to argue, however, that Democrats shouldn't take advantage of every opportunity they have in the meantime to, as Reid says, "do 'everything in their power' to block 'wacky' Supreme Court nominees and to not be 'complicit' in supporting GOP priorities like tax cuts for the rich and repealing Obamacare."
Ending the filibuster is ultimately as important a democratic reform as doing away with the electoral college. If Reid's accomplishment of partially nuking the filibuster has done anything it's demonstrated that there is good reason for flexibility and forward thinking in our institutions in working toward more democratic ideals. He made what had been dismissed for years as a wacky idea cooked up by a blogger (our own David Waldman) into a reality.
Where it goes in the immediate future isn’t clear. There are some good reasons for Mitch McConnell to keep it around for at least the next two years—he would avoid a big fight with some of his senior members who want to keep it; he’d have a handy excuse for not doing radical and potentially very unpopular things—the Democrats didn’t let him do it; and thus he would have more of a check against an unpredictable and wacky president and Republican House. In the long run, however, Reid is right. It’s going to end, and Senate leaders are going to have to figure out how to govern more responsibly without this parliamentary trick.