For the past ten years, ever since then Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, coined the term, any attempt to reform the filibuster—that is, limit or abolish it—has been called, for short, the “nuclear option.” On Thursday, it finally happened.

The nuclear option: the metaphor is apt—just not in the way it’s normally understood. There’s no political equivalent of the mushroom cloud, the fireball, the flattened city, the millions dead, the dazed survivors doomed to die of radiation poisoning. The only casualty is the ability of a Senate minority to routinely veto a President’s nominees for executive positions and the lower federal courts, even when those nominees have the support of a Senate majority. That ability, when you think about it, was the real nuclear option. What happened today isn’t Hiroshima; it’s arms control.

The aptness of the metaphor, though, isn’t about bombs. It’s about energy.

Nuclear power plants have their drawbacks, as we’ve learned from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. And protest movements against nuclear power have yielded all sorts of good things, from fabulous rock concerts to Green Party legislators in European parliaments. But global warming has changed the picture. Nuclear power isn’t the best way to reduce carbon emissions—that would be wind and solar. For the intermediate future, though, breezes and rays won’t be enough. As growing numbers of environmentalists and climate scientists have come to realize, nuclear power is much, much better than what remains the real-world alternative: fossil fuels like oil and, especially, coal. When it comes to energy, the nuclear option, though not the best of all possible worlds, is better than the one we’re living in.

It’s the same with the filibuster. As I’ve pointed out from time to time, judicial appointments—especially Supreme Court appointments—are actually the only area where there is even a remotely plausible argument on the pro-filibuster side. That is because judicial appointments are for life. Legislation enacted by one Congress can be repealed by the next. But judges cannot be repealed. They’re on the bench for good (and for ill). Not until death—or voluntary retirement—do they depart. The only way to get rid of them is impeachment and removal, a fate that has befallen only eight of the thousands who have served in the two hundred and thirty-five years since the ratification of the Constitution. This argument is strongest as applied to Supreme Court nominees, which is why the Democrats exempted them from today’s rule change.

There was a considerably weaker argument for filibustering executive appointments, rooted in the word “advice” in the “advice and consent” clause of Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. Legislation just requires consent. But Cabinet members and many other lesser executive officeholders don’t have life tenure. They can’t be repealed, but when there’s a new President they get replaced. There’s absolutely no reason for requiring a Senate supermajority to get them confirmed. A majority should be enough—just as it should be enough to pass ordinary legislation.

The Senate Democrats’ reasons for today’s action, though, didn’t have all that much to do with these highfalutin considerations. It was a fully justified reaction—a nuclear reaction!—to the outrageous abuse of the filibuster by Senate Republicans.

“In the history of the republic, there have been a hundred and sixty-eight filibusters of executive and judicial nominations,” Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said after the vote. “Half of them have occurred during the Obama Administration.” Reid added, “Further, only twenty-three district-court nominees have been filibustered in the entire history of this country. Twenty of them were nominated by President Obama.”

Of course, the most outrageous abuses have been against legislation. Obama, in his post-nuke pressroom remarks, complained of these, too. Absent the filibuster, we would now be enjoying the economic fruits of a bigger, better-designed stimulus. Cap-and-trade would be in place. The Affordable Care Act would not have been weighted down with so many Rube Goldberg contrivances, and it might well have included a “public option” to keep the insurance companies honest.

But abuse is inherent in the very existence of the filibuster. The supposed Golden Age, when filibusters were rare, was pure lead. As someone around here wrote back in 2005, when it was Republicans who were threatening to go nuclear and Democrats who were urging everyone to watch “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”:

Absent Senate filibusters, the anti-lynching bills of 1922, 1935, and 1938 would have become law, bringing federal force to bear against racist violence and possibly allowing the civil-rights movement to achieve its victories decades earlier; direct election of the President would have replaced the electoral college in time for the 1972 election; and nearly all Americans would now be covered by a program of national health insurance.

(Whether we will still stumble our way to that last item, of course, remains to be seen.)

Today’s vote was a historic advance. It was a leap in the dark, too, and it’s no wonder that Democrats took so long to take it: when Republicans again control the Senate, as one day—maybe one day soon—they will, the likelihood is that they will busily populate the federal bench with dozens of little Scalias and Thomases. But that’s what they did the last time they had a Senate majority, thanks to the reluctance of Democrats to use the filibuster so often and so ferociously.

The advance will be that much more historic if it is what some Republicans (and a few Democrats) fear it will be: a step toward abolishing the filibuster altogether. Admittedly, one consequence would be that when Republicans controlled all three lawmaking bodies—House, Senate, White House—we’d see what conservative governance truly looks like. But when Democrats were in charge, we’d see the opposite.

That would make government, and government policymaking, more coherent—and, more important, more accountable. Action, not gridlock, would be the norm. Over time, I believe, the new normal would be to the advantage of those among us who want our government to do its part to solve the nation’s problems and advance the well-being of the nation’s people—not those who want our government to fail, or simply to disappear. And to the advantage of those who want our government to be truly democratic, with a small “d”—even if that sometimes means with a capital “R.”

Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty.