Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is going to be under a lot of pressure very soon from both House Speaker Paul Ryan and his new president, Donald Trump, to do their (probably sometimes conflicting) bidding. He doesn't, however, have a large enough majority in the Senate to do that, not as long as the filibuster exists. So here's the biggest question for him: nuke the filibuster or not.
So far, he's keeping mum:
Mr. McConnell would not tip his hand this week on how he would respond to such a Democratic approach. But he did not rule out the so-called nuclear option: changing rules via a procedural vote on the floor instead of the 67 votes officially required.
“I would not anticipate any particular strategy that the Democrats might employ to defeat it or what we might do in reaction to that,” he said.
That's a whole lot of nothing. Of course he's anticipating Democratic filibusters and of course he's mulling his options for nuking it. There are going to be two immediate points of pressure he'll have to respond to: Obamacare repeal and the Supreme Court.
He wouldn't have to eliminate the filibuster on legislation to gut Obamacare—that can be done through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority vote in the Senate and which they've already had a dry run with. That's the process they used to force President Obama to veto their repeal earlier this year. The problems for McConnell in that: it will take a few months to accomplish and it isn't the "root and branch" repeal he promised when the Republicans regained the Senate in 2014. If Ryan, Trump, and he are going to keep that promise, he's got to nuke the filibuster for legislation. But if he does that, he has no check on what a rogue president and a Houseful of maniacs might do. While the odds are very much in favor of an enlarged Republican majority in 2018, the extremist fever dreams of Trump and House Republicans actually enacted as law could blow that to smithereens.
Likewise, given that Trump is not going to consult Democrats to find a consensus Supreme Court nominee, he'll need to nuke it for those appointments, just like Harry Reid decided to for all the lower courts and executive nominees. At the time, McConnell was livid, pretending a love and respect for the institutions of Congress that he had no problem blowing all to hell with his subsequent total blockade of Obama's SCOTUS nominee, Merrick Garland.
Here's what seems likeliest considering McConnell's calculating nature: he gets rid of the filibuster for the Supreme Court, because the list Trump came up with during the campaign is basically the Heritage Foundation list. He can live with that. But he needs a check on Trump and the House and also has the prospect of a 60-vote majority in two years' time. He can leave the legislative filibuster in place, look like a responsible leader by keeping Trump and the maniacs from blowing up the world.
So that's my prediction, for what it's worth. McConnell does have some interest in seeing a tempered-enough Republican party that there won't be immediate backlash big enough to doom 2018. He can afford to wait two years until he has his filibuster-proof majority. That's said, he might just decide to go whole hog with the rest of the terrorists of the new white nationalist leadership and blow it all to hell. It could happen, too.