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The White House Rose Garden is rarely a scene of insurrection. But this morning the president used the setting for phase one of a strategy that could end with Senate Democrats exercising the "nuclear option" to reset rules around the use of the filibuster. Simply by saying three names.

The plan goes something like this. At the event (details below), Obama nominated three judges to fill three vacancies on an appeals court serving Washington, D.C. (The D.C. Circuit, as it's known, has broad power to review federal regulations, making it an extremely powerful bench — and one from which four sitting Supreme Court Justices have come.) The Constitution mandates that the Senate vote on those nominees, which under normal circumstances would likely mean that they'd be approved. After all, 54 Democrats and Democrat-friendly independents is a larger number than 45 Republicans.

But these are not normal circumstances. Obama has nominated people to fill those three vacancies before, only to see the nominations blocked by a Republican filibuster. In the current Senate, a nominee needs 60 votes — enough to end any filibuster and be approved. With the Democrats losing a senator yesterday, reaching that number just became harder.