Sweet How sweet it is. Less than a year ago—on November 21st, to be exact—Harry Reid went nuclear. As he’d threatened, in order to get a few of President Obama’s D.C. Circuit Court nominees past a Republican filibuster—staged because that court for years had had more judges than its workload required—Reid unleashed what had come to be called “the nuclear option.” He ended the availability of the filibuster for most executive branch nominations, not by the two-thirds vote that Senate rules had long required but by a simple majority. With yesterday’s mid-term election results now in, it looks like Reid will have enjoyed his win for less than a year. As I wrote at the time, here, here, and here, stating the obvious, what goes around comes around. Not that he didn’t get some substantive results over that short period, mind you: After a D.C. Circuit panel struck a major blow against Obamacare in July, for example, followed only hours later by a Fourth Circuit decision going the other way, thus setting up a circuit split suited for Supreme Court resolution, the full DC Circuit, on which Obama’s new appointees were now sitting, vacated the panel’s decision just six weeks later, thus removing the circuit split. The Supreme Court is likely to take up the issue in time in any event, as other circuits weigh in on it. But timing is important on a matter like this. We’ll see. The larger issue, however, is that there will be other nominations over the next two years, and not only for life-time appointments on our federal courts. There is, for example, a looming vacancy at the Department of Justice: Attorney General Eric Holder has said he will stay on until his successor is confirmed. Among those under serious consideration for that post is one Thomas Perez, whose stints as the current secretary of labor and, before that, as assistant attorney general for civil rights have raised enough concerns to keep the new National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Senate Judiciary Committee’s staff occupied for some time. And where will those remaining Democratic senators who voted for Harry Reid’s nuclear option be sitting? Why on the minority side, watching Republicans enjoy their newly acquired power to block controversial Democratic nominees by the vote of a mere majority—all because of Harry’s hubris. But it wasn’t Harry’s alone. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning, after his victory speech following his 2012 re-election, President Obama walked off the stage and made separate calls to Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic campaign chairman Steve Israel, telling them “he would spend the next two years helping Democrats retake the House in 2014.” In politics as in life, hubris has its price. We will now have a proper vetting of the president’s nominees, and that is good.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:04:45 +0000
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