Senate rule-change-vote roundup

William Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection sees a silver lining:

Decades of negative and destructive policies can be reversed with a bare majority. Obamacare can be repealed with a bare majority. True Conservative Judges will not be banished due to a filibuster threat.

Yes, it’s true that the absence of a filibuster could accelerate the destructive policies. That fear is justified, particularly as to the judiciary. But face it, we were headed there anyway unless drastic action was taken.

That drastic action took place yesterday. By Democrats.

Now at least we have a chance to achieve previously unimaginable progress in a single presidential term if we also have bare majorities in Congress and a President with the willpower. It will take only one such term.

The ratchet has been broken. And opportunity created, even if dependent upon future electoral success.

John Hinderaker at Power Line says a bit of historical perspective shows us that the filibuster-or-no question looks one way or the other depending on whose ox is getting gored.

The filibuster has always been controversial–senators as far back as Henry Clay have threatened to abolish it by changing Senate rules–and the attitudes of politicians and pundits generally depend on whether their party is in the majority or the minority. When the Democrats were a minority in the Senate, Harry Reid denounced a threat to change the Senate’s filibuster rules as “un-American.” In our early days, we embarrassed the Minneapolis Star Tribune by pointing out that they had editorialized effusively both for and against the filibuster, depending on which party controlled the Senate. But the same could be said of many newspapers and other commentators.

[snip]

Reid’s timing is a little puzzling. In the short-to-medium term, the rule change is more likely to benefit Republicans than Democrats. My guess is that we will have a Republican Senate in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017; if so, the precedent the Democrats set today will come back to haunt them with a vengeance. To cite just one example, it will now be possible to pass Obamacare repeal in the Senate with 51 Republican votes.

Long-term, the filibuster is not a partisan issue. Both parties will be sometimes in the majority, and sometimes in the minority. Arguments for and against the filibuster strike me as inconclusive, so I would keep it. The filibuster has existed for a long time and is part of our political fabric. No one can fully foresee the consequences of doing away with it. The sound conservative approach, I think, is not to alter, without a compelling reason, an institution that has been part of our political life for going on 200 years. 

Mark Levin excoriates Senate Pubs for exhibiting symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome (says they're "comfortable with tyranny"), saying the tepid "sad-day-for-the-Senate" response was pathetic.   Says what Pubs should do is serve notice to the FHers that they will use this rule change to repeal FHer-care when they take back the Senate in the midterms.

Dana Milbank at the WaPo, who is into that bipartisanship hoo-ha and saw the Senate as the last area of federal government where it could thrive to a least some degree says this move demolishes that.  Cites the Senate floor remarks yesterday of Carl Levin, one of three FHers to vote against it, and cites Joe Biden's 2005 remarks against the nuclear option as well.

I may update this as the day progresses.  The irony is that this move, which deepens and makes more bitter the divide in post-America, seems to have produced a consensus that we will now see even more intensified partisanship.