The main justification put forward by Democrats defending their decision to blow up the Senate rules and end filibusters on Cabinet and judicial nominations is that things are so bad now, they can’t get worse. That’s the spin President Obama put on the situation Thursday as he took a rare turn in the White House press room to spike the football.
This idea is integral to the president’s argument that Republican obstructionism has made it impossible for him to govern. Even on topics where Republican input has been nil, such as the ObamaCare rollout, Democrats have stuck to this theme — blaming Republicans for stirring up dissent against their unpopular, dysfunctional legislation even as most Americans have focused on Obama’s broken promises and a dysfunctional Web site.
There’s no denying that partisanship is nastier in Congress than it once was. But if Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid think it can’t get worse, they’re kidding themselves.
For all of the bitter combat in just the last year (over the budget, ObamaCare, the shutdown and the various administration scandals), the business of government has largely proceeded unhindered. Many nominations have been approved, bipartisan legislation passed and the unanimous consent to keep the upper body functioning has almost always been there.
But now that Reed has pushed the plunger on the “nuclear option,” all bets are off. The 45 Senate Republicans may no longer have the power to block Obama’s appointments on their own, but Senate procedures still give them plenty of latitude to hold up legislation. Not only will Reed find it even harder to do his job now that he has broken faith with his opponents and sought to squelch dissent, he and Obama may also find that the benefits of their decision aren’t as great as they expect.
On the surface, it would seem that the president now has carte blanche to do what he has longed to accomplish since moving into the White House: fundamentally alter the balance of the federal courts with the kind of hard-core ideological liberals that were being blocked by filibusters. But this ignores what will be uppermost on the minds of the several red-state Democrats who face uphill re-election fights next year.
As Josh Gerstein points out in Politico, the roster of potential liberal judges is filled by the ranks of left-wingers who had little chance of getting the 60 votes they needed under the old rules. But getting to 51 votes may not be so easy for these liberals when many of the Democrats the president is counting on won’t want to hand their GOP opponents new talking points by rubber-stamping ideological judges.
Some may get through, but any controversial nominees will find themselves being thrown under the bus by moderate Democrats who can no longer count on the GOP or the filibuster rules to save them from a vote they’d rather not take.
And that’s just the most obvious fallout from Reed’s move. As important is the way the rules change will now make it impossible to assemble bipartisan coalitions.
As we saw with immigration reform this year, for all the bitterness in DC, enough conservatives and liberals were still able to work together to get a bill passed in the Senate. But after Obama’s scorched-earth approach to the shutdown and now the nuclear option, you can forget about anything like that in the foreseeable future.
This will alter the nature of the Senate far more than anything we have seen before. The Tea Party made it tougher for Republicans to work with Democrats these last three years. But Obama has now ensured that even those inclined to ignore the Tea Party will also refuse to play ball.
That’s why Democrats do well to avoid celebrations of their move. The benefits from it to President Obama will be minimal — and the costs, in terms of dysfunction and the certainty of even worse political warfare to come, are considerable.
From contentions, the group blog at commentarymagazine.com. Jonathan S. Tobin is Commentary’s senior online editor.