This is shaping up as a week of reckoning in the Senate. Either Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans relent and allow the president to exercise his power to appoint people to positions at the NLRB and CFPB so that they can function as Congress intended, or Harry Reid and Senate Democrats finally push the nuclear button on filibuster reform.
Important to keep in mind that filibuster reform would be a result of this reckoning, but not precisely the point of it. Filibuster reform is the tool Democrats are waving about — the threat of it, to be exact — but the narrow objective is to get the NLRB and CFPB up and running. If Democrats can achieve that short of changing Senate filibuster rules, they would leap at the chance. For that reason, I suspect we’ll see some kind of deal struck between Reid and McConnell, but it’s hard to conceive of a deal in which both sides are truly happy with the result. Someone is bound to lose here.
