This worm has turned on filibuster reform.
Senate Republicans will meet Tuesday to decide what to do about the filibuster reform Democrats passed last year that allows a simple majority vote for presidential nominees, other than to the Supreme Court, to move forward. For the past year, they've been in an extended temper tantrum over it, using every trick in their bitter little book to crawl the pace of the Senate to a halt and make it take as long as possible for any nomination to advance. That's because they wanted to punish Harry Reid and the Democrats for "breaking" the Senate. Now, though, that they've got the majority
some of them seem to have had a change of heart about that once horrible, destructive, tyrannical reform.
"My guess is even people who might have been inclined to go back [to the old rules] are being persuaded more all the time that that's not practical," said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the GOP Senate leadership.
Retaining the weaker standard would likely have scant impact on President Barack Obama's nominees in his final two years in office. Republicans controlling the Senate could simply choose to not hold votes on nominations they oppose and would not need filibusters, or procedural delays, to derail them.
In the longer term, keeping the relaxed rule would make it harder for Democrats to block nominations should Republicans win the White House and retain control of the Senate in the 2016 elections.
It's all about 2016. "'A lot of people think it would be a disadvantage to us' to revive the 60-vote threshold, said veteran Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. 'What if we had a president?'" That's the thinking, apparently, of two key senators. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) are the former and the soon-to-be chairs of the Judiciary Committee which is in charge of all those judicial nominations. They are both ready to keep the rule change, with Hatch already decided and Grassley leaning that way. Their leader, Mitch McConnell has merely said "[i]t's impossible to unring a bell."
At least one, John McCain (R-AZ) is aware that they'll look just a teensy bit inauthentic if they keep the rule after having screamed bloody murder over it for the past year. "After the way we complained about what they did, it would be rank hypocrisy," he says. But that's not likely to trouble him, or any other Republican, for very long. It's not in their DNA to be concerned about being hypocrites.