Senate Republicans are considering a filibuster reform that might appease the House Republicans who have been clamoring for the upper body to change its rules so that the House's agenda could more easily pass. That's not going over well with everyone on the Senate side, and in fact the proposal these senators are crafting seems designed more for show for House Republicans than an actual, viable reform.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is leading the group that will propose eliminating the filibuster on the motion to proceed just for spending bills. The motion to proceed is the vote that puts bills on the floor of the Senate, and is where bills are usually blocked. The idea Alexander and crew are apparently discussing ending that procedure. But here's the rub:
But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is deeply skeptical of any move to gut the legislative filibuster, as are a number of Senate conservatives. Those members of the GOP conference's right flank believe that giving appropriations bills special status and eliminating a procedural leverage point for individual members serves only to further empower Reid, McConnell and their successors.
"Looks like this is further an effort to centralize power," said one aide familiar with ongoing discussions over the Senate rules. "What you're doing is, you're giving one Senate committee more power." Brian Darling, a former top aide to Sen. Rand Paul, said that "removing the right to filibuster the motion to proceed to appropriations bills would be the beginning of the end of the filibuster." […]
It may all be a moot point. Alexander and other Senate Republicans say they won't use the Senate's "nuclear option," which requires just a slight majority to change the Senate rules and was famously used by Reid to gut the filibuster on all nominations but those to the Supreme Court in 2013.
So Republican leaders would need 67 votes to pass a rules change, a tall order in the divided Senate.
If they aren't going to use the nuclear option, it's not going to pass. So you have to wonder how serious they are about getting this done. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that it's a priority of his to get the budget and all 12 spending bills for 2017 done, and his "ultimate goal is clearing the entire appropriations process through Congress for the first time in 22 years." Which is also not a realistic goal because the House exists. You remember the House, the place where they couldn't pass any spending bills last summer because of the Republicans massive blunder over the confederate flag.
Just the fact that it's the whining from House Republicans—and largely Freedom Caucus maniacs—that created the pressure for McConnell and crew to consider getting rid of the filibuster is probably enough to turn 90 percent of the Senate against it. As Harry Reid said, expressing the sentiment of just about every senator, "[t]hey would love to write rules for the Senate, but we do not want the Senate to be like the House."