It’s official: The Senate just got rid of part of the filibuster

Wow, I wasn't paying attention to the news today and just saw this, It’s official: The Senate just got rid of part of the filibuster.

A majority of Democrats voted on Thursday to modify the Senate's rules on filibusters for the first time since 1975. From now on, judicial nominees to federal courts can be confirmed by a simple majority vote. So can the president's executive-branch nominations.

It's not a complete repeal of the filibuster: Supreme Court nominees can still be blocked by 41 senators, as can all legislation. But even this smaller rule change — a move known as the "nuclear option" — is a big break with precedent.

In all, 52 Democrats voted to change the filibuster rules, while all 45 Republicans and 3 Democrats opposed the move. (West Virginia's Joe Manchin, Michigan's Carl Levin, and Arkansas's Mark Pryor were the three dissenting Democrats.)

Ezra Klein lists Nine reasons the filibuster change is a huge deal. I only found two of them interesting.

1. The practical end of the Senate's 60-vote threshold is not plunging the chamber into new and uncharted territories. It's the omnipresence of the filibuster in recent decades that plunged the chamber into new and uncharted territories. At the founding of the Republic, the filibuster didn't exist. Prior to the 1970s, filibusters — which required 67 votes to break for most of the 20th century — were incredibly rare.

2. Republicans take a lot of the blame here. They've used the filibuster more aggressively than Democrats, by a wide margin. They've also been less willing to cooperate with Democrats on general legislative efforts, making the presence of the filibuster more costly to the Democratic Party. And they've been so unwilling to work with Democrats this year that they essentially removed all reason for Democrats to stay their hand. The way Senate Democrats saw it was that if they weren't going to get immigration reform or gun control or jobs bills or anything big that they cared about, then at least they would get their judicial and executive-branch nominations.

In part this came up because of the three vacant seats on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and in fact, Reid's rule change came on a vote for Patricia Millett to this court. The D.C. Circuit is the court at the center of the filibuster fight. Here’s why it matters.

Ezra Klein also points out that One huge effect of filibuster reform: Obama can actually fire people. "The constant use of the filibuster against political appointments made it extraordinarily difficult for the White House to fire anyone because they didn't know whether they'd be able to appoint a replacement -- or, if they could appoint a replacement, who Republicans would actually accept. And the more political controversy there was around an issue the more dangerous a personnel change became." It also means the grueling vetting process might get a little easier.

Dylan Matthews talked with The world’s leading filibuster expert on what happened today and what to expect next. but it was mostly about the specific technique Reid used, so skip that if you're not interested.

Matthews also wrote Everything you need to know about Thursday’s filibuster change and the last half is interesting about how Obama dawdled with judicial nominees.

As for speculation about how this will play out when or if the Democrats are in the minority, Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good response, More Scalias and Thomases Please.

Threatening to appoint "more Scalias and Thomases" is basically threatening to appoint more judges who would unwaveringly hew to their vision of the country. That any political party would like to do this strikes me as unsurprising. The place to decide whether we're going to have "more Scalias and Thomases" is the ballot box. That's why during debates candidates are usually asked about the kind of judges they'd appoint. The place to decide whether having "more Scalias and Thomases" actually worked out is the election following.

Elections don't always have consequences, but they should. You can't judge a party's agenda if they don't get a chance to actually implement. Judicial and executive appointments are indispensable to that endeavor. If you don't want to even have the experiment, if you don't like being in the minority, win the damn election—which is another way of saying, make the case to the American people.

Ed Kilgore agrees, No Buyer’s Remorse Here on the Filibuster by Ed Kilgore. "For one thing, it was a foregone conclusion that Republicans would “go nuclear”—certainly over judges, and maybe over everything—if and when they were back in power. I mean, seriously, does anyone think that after forty years of promises to the Christian Right the GOP is going to be able to deny its “base” the fifth sure Supreme Court vote (perhaps) necessary to overturn Roe v. Wade? Over a Senate rule? No way. The judicial filibuster power was doomed anyway, and all it served to do at present was as a temporary instrument for GOP power that would be exercised by any means available."

Andrew Sullivan collects some other interesting reactions, The Senate Partially-Nukes The Filibuster: Reax