Last night there was a rule change in the U.S. Senate that Republicans wasted no time in branding a "nuclear option." The phrase "nuclear option" was coined by Sen. Trent Lott (R., Miss.) in 2003 to describe a parliamentary maneuver in which the Senate could eliminate or modify the filibuster by a simple majority vote. (Under the dread Rule 22, you need 67 votes to change existing filibuster rules. That's seven more than the 60 votes you need under Rule 22 to break a filibuster.) The maneuver to which Lott attached this incendiary phrase was, at that time, one that the then-Republican majority was considering to break a string of Democratic filibusters on judgeship confirmations. In the end, a compromise was reached and the nuclear option was averted.

Virtually all Democrats and even many Republicans opposed using the nuclear option when the matter came to a head in 2005. But I was for it. (My only objection was that it wasn't sweeping enough; the GOP rule change would have ended filibusters only for judicial nominations.) I was for it not because I had any fondness for the conservative judges that President George W. Bush was trying to appoint, but because I felt that it had become way too easy for any Senate minority, Democrat or Republican, to bring the federal government to a standstill. After the Democrats retook the Senate in 2007 a lot of liberals found themselves agreeing with me. But now, instead of calling it the "nuclear option," which made the parliamentary move sound reckless and scary, they called it the "constitutional option."

Republicans, meanwhile, started using the phrase "nuclear option" not to express manly swagger, as they had before, but to make the filibuster rule change sound, well, reckless and scary. It had such excellent propaganda value that the GOP started it applying it not just to the proposed filibuster rule-change, but to any Senate rule change. When the Democrats considered using the Senate "reconciliation" process to pass health care reform, that was a "nuclear option." And when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made a rule change last night, and then got the change approved on a party-line majority vote, that was a "nuclear option" too. Only it wasn't. It was a good change, but it wasn't nearly as good a change as the nuclear option would be.

The China trade bill was on the floor—a bill, I should emphasize, that I'm not sure I'm even in favor of, so what follows is not a self-interested argument in which procedure is a smokescreen for some policy agenda. Republicans had tried to filibuster but Reid had the 60 votes necessary to invoke cloture. Let me say that again. The filibuster wasn't at issue. A filibuster had already been averted. (This will be on the test.)

What Reid blocked was not the stupid majority-vote-denying filibuster, but a stupid post-filibuster majority-vote-denying maneuver that the Republicans were using to block the bill's passage. One I'd never even heard of. There are many such tactics, alas, and they are used more than ever before. What was once envisioned as a system of checks and balances has become so paralyzingly complex that Senate proceedings now resemble a Quaker meeting, where any decision that isn't unanimous gets tabled indefinitely.