Republicans are increasingly eager to rewrite the rules of Congress to push through their agenda — never mind any potential long-term damage to the institution.

Senate Republicans nuked the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees to install Neil Gorsuch, and House Republicans blew past the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office in their rush to repeal Obamacare. Now rank-and-file GOP senators are pushing to further erode congressional norms as they take up their own health care plan, eye massive tax cuts and confirm a new slate of lifetime appointees to the federal courts.


“It is a growing sense among Republican senators, and I’m one of them, that we’ve got to make the Senate functional again,” said Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, who said Democratic rule “blocked the functioning, legislative branch of our government.”

The agitation to test tradition isn’t new. But it reflects Republicans’ frustration with the lack of progress in their first year with complete control of Washington in more than a decade. That’s particularly true for an ambitious and sometimes impatient newer generation of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who are eager to notch legislative wins.

And it’s not just lawmakers. The other end of Pennsylvania Avenue is egging on Congress for even more changes. President Donald Trump pushed the Senate earlier this year to invoke the so-called nuclear option to ease Gorsuch’s confirmation, and has urged senators to dump the legislative filibuster so bills can pass with a simple majority.

Senators — from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on down — have rejected Trump’s call to permanently end the 60-vote threshold on legislation. But they acknowledge the changing atmosphere under Republican control.

“I don’t know if there’s any takeaway other than that I think people have become way more demanding and they want to have a sense of closure on some of these issues more quickly,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the third-ranking member of Republican leadership.

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Thune added that there’s “so much pressure with the constant barrage that I think people feel out there in the 24-7 news cycle we live in, that if you say… we’re going to follow normal procedure and we won’t be finished with this until the fall, some people don’t have patience for it anymore.”

Democrats see it differently.

“The only time that they win is when they defy the rules,” said Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii.

Though the GOP has long accused Democrats of ramming through the Affordable Care Act, House Republicans passed legislation to repeal it without waiting for a final CBO report on the bill’s consequences, a highly atypical decision. Republicans defended the move by saying previous versions of the bill had already been scored and the final draft differed little. The CBO is expected to release its score of the final House-passed measure on Wednesday.

Now as GOP senators look to gut Obamacare, three conservatives are trying to drum up support to overturn long-standing precedent to dismantle more of the health law.

Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah are arguing the Senate parliamentarian — the nonpartisan referee who will decide how much of Obamacare can be repealed under budget reconciliation procedures — could be overruled by Vice President Mike Pence in his role as president of the Senate.

The trio has so far had little luck getting other Republicans on board, who fear that trumping parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough is a slippery slope to doing away with the legislative filibuster.

But the conservatives are still working to make their case.

“It’s plain on the text of the statute that it is the vice president who has the authority to make the decision,” Cruz said. “As former parliamentarian Robert Dove said on national television in 2010 concerning the Obamacare debates, the parliamentarian merely advises, the vice president decides.”

Sen. Pat Toomey is also proposing an aggressive use of reconciliation — not for health care, but for the GOP’s bid to rewrite the tax code.

The Pennsylvania Republican is encouraging his colleagues to draft plans that call for a 20- or even 30-year procedural time frame, rather than the customary 10-year budget window. Such a gambit would make it much easier for Republicans to slash corporate tax rates while evading restrictions against ballooning the deficit.

“Congress must seize this rare opportunity,” Toomey wrote in a recent op-ed. “We can’t let a fixation on deficit predictions or arcane budget rules get in the way.”

When it comes to judicial nominations, the Republicans’ April vote to invoke the nuclear option and eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold for Supreme Court confirmations may not be the only changes coming.

Trump is looking to fill an unusually high number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, and key GOP senators are considering getting around a decades-old tradition if Democrats block nominees.

Under the so-called blue-slip rule, any senator can halt proceedings for a judicial candidate from his or her home state simply by not returning a blue slip to the Senate Judiciary Committee. But the panel’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), hinted in a recent C-SPAN interview that he was more likely to abide by the rule on District Court nominees than the more powerful Circuit Court nominees.

“It’s much more a White House decision on Circuit judges than the District Court judges,” Grassley said. “I mean this is going to be an individual case-by-case decision, but it leads me to say that there’s going to have to be a less strict use or obligation to the blue slip policy for circuit, because that’s the way it’s been.”

Sen. Tom Cotton also says Republicans should be prepared to ditch the custom — which has sometimes been ignored for Circuit Court candidates in the past. “We can’t allow Democratic senators to continue to obstruct this president’s agenda,” the Arkansas Republican told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt earlier this month.

The issue could soon come to a head. Two of the 10 judicial nominees unveiled by the White House earlier this month who will likely draw the most controversy are Circuit Court nominees from states represented by Democratic senators, which would give them unilateral powers to halt those candidates under the blue-slip rule.

At least on the courts, Republicans say they’re justified in challenging political norms, because Democrats did it too, four years ago, with their own nuclear option for all nominations except to the Supreme Court.

“I think they’re taking the lessons from the Democrats,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said. “On the courts, of course, that was Harry Reid that did that and that opened the door. I don’t see that this is an overall changing or reversing or trading of fundamentals.”

Other possible changes being mulled are more tinkering-around-the-edges tweaks aimed at speeding up the slow-moving Senate.

For instance, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) floated an idea earlier this year to chop down the number of hours that senators could debate a nominee before a confirmation vote — a revival of a 113th Congress rule.

And a cluster of first-term Senate Republicans have been eager to get rid of a procedural vote to begin floor debate on government funding bills. A unified Democratic Caucus has frequently blocked appropriations bills over disputes on spending levels.

“You could still have cloture on the passage on the back end,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said of a vote to end a filibuster. “But on the front end, I think the American people deserve the Senate, which is called the greatest deliberative body in the world, to be deliberating more.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.