What happens if an entire 80-year-old agency of the United States government with some 1700 employees effectively ceases functioning, even as it continues to exist on paper and occupy a line on the federal budget?

That is the question that lies at the heart of the bitter dispute in the Senate over the Republican minority’s increasingly boundless use of the filibuster to block President Barack Obama’s executive branch nominees. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thought that he had struck an agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell early this year to hold off on the filibuster reform many Democratic senators were pushing for, on the understanding that McConnell would restrain the use of the tactic to block executive branch nominees. Instead, the Senate GOP is now vowing to block, among others, Obama’s nominees to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (a former Mitt Romney appointee in Massachusetts), the Department of Labor and the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, in what more and more veteran observers are diagnosing as a nullification approach to political opposition.

This has Reid warning that he may employ the “nuclear option” to change Senate rules to allow for a straight-majority vote on nominees. Reid told his Democratic colleagues last week that what McConnell was doing now was unprecedented, that they had been willing to hold votes on plenty of eyebrow-raising nominees made by George W. Bush: “I ate shit on those nominees,” Reid told them, according to Politico. McConnell, in turn, is warning that going nuclear will make Reid the “worst leader” in the history of the Senate. To which Reid retorted: “He tends to not focus on what he has done to the Senate. I guess he follows, I hope not, the demagogue theory that the more you keep saying something that is false, people start believing it.” A meeting is scheduled for Monday evening to find a way through the crisis.

It is tempting to dismiss it all as so much institutional wrangling until one considers the agency that has suffered the most extreme fallout from Republican intransigence, the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB has, since the New Deal era, been tasked with enforcing the nation’s labor laws. But it has been brought to a complete standstill, leaving both workers and employers around the country in a confounding limbo with no end in sight.

Many Republicans have never been particularly fond of the NLRB and did their best to install business-friendly people to the five-member board. But until recently they accepted it as the nation’s arbiter of workplace disputes in the never-ending balancing act between employer and labor. A certain someone said in 1985: