Back in 2005, I was asked to defend the Senate filibuster of nominations in the pages of Human Events.
At
the time, many conservatives were perfecting and pushing a mechanism
for blowing up the Senate rules -- dubbed the "nuclear option."
The
GOP was riding high at the beginning of 2005, and many conservatives
felt that Republicans would control the Senate and the White House for
the indefinite future. Thus, in their minds, there was no downside to
eliminating Senate protections for the minority, as they expected that
it would be Democrats who would be hurt by that change.
As most
readers know, the GOP lost the Senate and the House less than two years
later. They lost the White House in the next presidential election. And,
in November, 2013, Harry Reid took the "nuclear option" -- the
parliamentary device perfected by conservatives -- and used it to pack
the circuit courts with liberals. For good measure, he packed the NLRB,
allowing it to rewrite labor law by executive fiat.
And he staffed
Dodd-Frank, thereby allowing that seminal legislation to be implemented.
It is only by serendipity that Reid was not accorded a vacancy on the
Supreme Court which would have allowed him to use the "nuclear option"
to transform the High Court into a liberal juggernaut.
Ten years
later, the same conservatives who rolled the dice and lost in 2005 are
proposing to eliminate the legislative filibuster. If they succeed --
and if Democrats take the Senate and White House in 2016 -- everything
they care about will be irreparably gone.