Matt Latimer is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a co-partner in Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm based in Alexandria, and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

This is the week when we will discover if Washington really is as broken and hopeless as President Donald Trump and his supporters long have claimed it is. Looks like the answer is yes.

If an affable and well-qualified jurist—as attested to by none other than the American Bar Association—cannot be confirmed to a seat on the Supreme Court without Thelma and Louise let’s-go-down-in-glory dramatics, then nothing in Congress works anymore. Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation would not change the balance of the court; he would be a conservative replacing another, Antonin Scalia, who unexpectedly passed away. And in a more sensible day, the robust endorsement by the ABA, no conservative mouthpiece, would have been more than enough to see him to bipartisan passage (as it did, for Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor). But these, of course, are not sensible days.


This should not surprise anyone, of course, and it’s sadly not a novel argument anymore. Consider that for years, the entire Republican House pledged to repeal Obamacare as soon as they had the power to do so. Foolish voters undoubtedly assumed that years of planning to derail President Barack Obama’s signature achievement would have led to, well, a plan. We all saw the embarrassing goose egg that resulted. Now, an even more humiliating, and consequential, disaster lies in store for the once august body known as the United States Senate. And it is a tragedy. For no other reason other than that Congress is completely broken and seemingly incapable of governance, Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer are now forced to play a catastrophic game of chicken over the Gorsuch nomination that I suspect neither wants to win.

Let’s be clear: The so-called nuclear option being seriously contemplated by Republican leaders to eliminate the filibuster of Supreme Court nominations is a tactic of last resort, forced on them in a final acknowledgment that the Senate as we’d known it for decades, and as the founders envisioned it, is dead. The decision also, as McConnell surely knows, puts him in a difficult bind in the future. Indeed, for Republicans it will prove to be a nightmare, one they are freely if reluctantly choosing.

The first reason is obvious. Republicans won’t be in the majority forever. Should Democrats take over the Senate and the White House in 2020, for example, they will have a far easier time replacing justices on the left, such as Ginsburg, with even more leftist nominees. Removing the 60-vote requirement on Supreme Court nominees also will lead to intense pressure on Republicans to remove the filibuster for everything—something McConnell vows, for the moment, to resist. But that may not be a future Senate leader’s position. This is why slopes are slippery.

The second reason is political. Republicans have a shot at winning a large number of Senate seats in 2018, including 10 held by Democrats in states Trump won last year. One of the major messaging points to motivate voters is the need to elect 60 Republicans to overcome Senate filibusters. Deploying the nuclear option now will give that message much less urgency.

Third—Republicans won’t admit this publicly of course—the filibuster is a useful piece of leverage against the current president—or any president—to deter some of their excesses and encourage compromise. “We’d really like to pass this, Mr. President, but you know we need to find a way to get to 60 … ” This argument, too, is now endangered.

Lastly, and in what is perhaps the cruelest insult to members of the “upper chamber,” the end of the filibuster would transform the Senate into simply a slightly more gilded version of the House. The Senate was envisioned as the more reasonable of the two chambers, where compromise and conciliation would be the order of the day. Because senators reflect a larger composition of their respective states and have longer terms of office, the idea was that there would be less of a need to engage in petty politics or respond to the whims of constituencies.

When I first came to Washington, I worked as an aide in both chambers. There was no doubt where most staffers preferred to be. The House was often petty. Members fought intensely for media coverage and other ways to stand out from their in-state colleagues. There were more desperate stunts to get attention, more extreme positions to satisfy their base, all in a frenzy to climb up the political ladder and run for higher office. The Senate was slower, more deliberative, more sophisticated, more dignified and frankly cooler. Senators prized their little club and all their various rules and traditions, some of them nonsensical, like they were treasures that no one else could ever understand.

We’d hear Robert Byrd offer his long and famous soliloquies on the Constitution and even stop to listen sometimes. On occasion, you’d even see people like Hillary Clinton or Dianne Feinstein or Ted Kennedy working on legislation with conservatives like Jon Kyl or Orrin Hatch. Even pitched battles on the floor of the Senate or in the media between senators of different parties often came with a little knowing glance or a shrug. As if to say, “Yeah, we have to do this, but we’ll find a way to strike a deal.”



If the Senate proves no more workable than the House, if it now indulges in similar games of brinkmanship and silly antics to appeal to its base, what, pray tell, do we need the Senate for at all?



As a general rule, senators tended to look down their noses or smile at the juvenile antics of their colleagues in the House. Well, those days are gone. The circus has made its way across the Capitol. Perhaps the surest sign of this new state of affairs was the needless two-week delay in confirming Elaine Chao as secretary of transportation. She not only had already served in a Cabinet, as George W. Bush’s secretary of labor, but was a completely known quantity to Senate Democrats, since she is also McConnell’s wife. Chao eventually was confirmed by an overwhelming margin, 93 to 6. This might have been a rare sign of the Senate doing its job in a bipartisan fashion, except even that was ruined. That latter number of dissenters included every Senate Democrat thinking of running for president (who need to be on record opposing all things Trump) but, far more weirdly, Schumer, who seemed to want to send a signal of his total unreasonableness by going out of his way to diss his Senate counterpart’s wife. Not content with that, he then appeared to include her among the Trump nominations he deemed “anti-immigrant” and “anti-middle class.” Ouch.

If the Senate proves no more workable than the House, if it now indulges in similar games of brinkmanship and silly antics to appeal to its base, what, pray tell, do we need the Senate for at all? Sad!

It’s not too late to stop this, of course, though it’s impossible to be optimistic.

Let’s be fair: Democrats have a point behind their intransigence. When Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the court last year, the Republicans could have at least given him a hearing and an up-or-down vote. Most almost certainly would have demanded one in similar circumstances, had the positions of the parties been reversed.

But that was then. Garland will not be on the court. Gorsuch will, as even Senate Democrats recognize. It is time for them to stop sulking about the past and actually govern for the future. And if there is some face-saving gesture Republicans can offer to help them do that, then they ought to figure out what that is. This is not what many of the senators’ loudest, most traumatized and sullen constituents want, but it is what the country needs. And making those sorts of calls is why the Senate was created in the first place.