Senators squabble over Reid's threat to limit debate

Susan Davis | USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., set the U.S. Senate on a potentially chamber-altering course for next week, pledging to use his power to change Senate rules to push through President Obama's executive branch nominations despite furious opposition from Republicans.

"I do not want Sen. Reid to have written on his tombstone he presided over the end of the United States Senate," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., speaking on the Senate floor Thursday. "Yet, if he does what he's threatening to do, that would be what he's remembered for in the history of the country."

Citing long-simmering Democratic frustrations with successful GOP efforts to block Obama's nominees to the Consumer Financial Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board, among other agencies, Reid pledged Thursday to set in motion next week a series of votes to change Senate rules to lower the number of votes needed to end a filibuster of an executive branch nominee from 60 to 51 votes. The rules change could be accomplished with a simple majority vote.

"Shouldn't (presidents) be able to have the team they want? That's what this is all about. This is about making Washington work regardless of who's the president," Reid said.

It is informally called the "nuclear option" because it threatens to blow up Senate tradition and the remaining comity between the two parties.

"Senate Democrats are gearing up today to make one of the most consequential changes to the United States Senate in the history of our nation. And I guarantee you, it is a decision that, if they actually go through with it, they will live to regret," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

The Senate filibuster, immortalized in the 1939 film classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, is a broad term that includes any procedural effort to delay or obstruct Senate action. It is a defining characteristic of how the Senate operates and it's a tool that gives the minority party significant clout, unlike the U.S. House, which affords more sweeping powers to the majority.

Democrats today — as Republicans did nearly a decade ago on judicial nominees —accuse the minority of abusing filibuster rules to bring the Senate to a halt and hamstring the Obama administration's ability to run the executive branch. "I think what we're dealing with is the tyranny of the minority," said Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M.

Senate majority leaders in both parties have threatened to invoke the nuclear option for the better part of the past decade as the Senate has become more polarized, while Senate minority leaders have in turn warned of the dire consequences such an act could unleash on the chamber's esteemed rules and traditions.

Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., threatened to invoke the nuclear option on President Bush's judicial nominees in 2005, which Reid opposed at the time. A bipartisan group of 14 senators reached a compromise to avert it.

However, there was no sign of compromise in the Senate chamber on Thursday. "We worked our way through that (in 2005) because there were people who were reasonable, who moved forward. We don't have that same reasonable ideology among the Republicans," Reid said.

Reid told reporters he has the 51 votes he will need to change the rules, but some veteran Democrats, such as retiring Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., have long voiced strong opposition. "My position has not changed," Levin said. Democrats have a 54-seat majority.

Rank-and-file Republicans pleaded with Reid on the Senate floor to reconsider, and Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., requested a private, full Senate meeting on Monday before Reid moves forward in the process.

Reid said it was possible, but not likely, that a deal could be reached before he moves to change the rules on Tuesday. "We have to wait, see what the weekend brings. Maybe (Republicans) will be brought to reality. But the reality is, if they're not willing to be reasonable, we know where we're headed."