As explained at length here, Harry Reid’s Thursday night power play set a very narrow new precedent in the Senate. But it was a power play nonetheless. Setting aside its less-than-modest real impact, it required using the same “nuclear option” tactics Republicans threatened in 2005 during the fight over judicial filibusters. If in 2005 the GOP was threatening to detonate a massive H-bomb over a major city, last night Harry Reid set off a rusty old fission devise in the empty desert. Both nukes, very different impacts.
But Republicans are steamed. Steamed doesn’t really even begin to describe it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was practically trembling in anger Thursday night. On Twitter, NRSC chairman John Cornyn (R-TX) called the move “tyranny”. And a Senate GOP leadership aide sent me the following remark, suggesting Republicans will remember this whenever they take the majority.
“Democrats are remarkably short-sighted–they forget they’ll be in the minority someday and will have to live with THEIR rules,” the aide said.
In other words, setting new precedent is the new precedent, so Republicans will do it to. And they can do it to much greater consequence.
Reid’s professed reason for playing hardball Thursday was a familiar one: Republicans, he complained, were using the Senate’s rulebook to slow things to a crawl. Narrowly, that’s true. And no doubt the GOP has mastered the art of thwarting Democratic progress in the Senate.
But the rule McConnell was trying to exploit wouldn’t really have run down the clock — if it was a great delaying tactic, the GOP would have tried to use it more than once this Congress. Last night’s machinations were less about slowing down the Senate’s current business (the Chinese currency bill) and more about the larger politics of President Obama’s jobs bill. It looks like Reid will get his way on that score, and the reason Republicans are so steamed isn’t that they lost a narrow minority privilege, but because, well, Reid prevailed.
And it’s the way he prevailed that’s important in a broader sense. As with setting any new precedent, it’s unclear what all the consequences will be. Maybe Republicans use it in 2013 as cover to end the filibuster. That would be in the country’s long-term interest, even if you don’t like the near-term agenda Republicans would be able to enact. So the question then is, why do this now on something so low stakes, instead of earlier when the public policy ramifications would have been significant, and favorable? If you’re going to let the genie out of the bottle, why not wish for something big?
