The filibuster, what’s left of it, appears safe for the foreseeable future.
Republican senators said Wednesday that they have no appetite for reducing the threshold to move legislation from 60 votes to 51, even as they prepared to do the same thing for nominees to the Supreme Court.
And they are not under pressure from grassroots conservatives and advocacy groups to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” for legislation, even as such groups demand they do so to squash a Democratic filibuster of Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week sought to nuke any suggestion that the legislative filibuster was in jeopardy.
“Who would be the biggest beneficiary of that right now? It’d be the majority, right? There’s not a single senator in the majority who thinks we ought to change the legislative filibuster — not one,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters this week.
On Thursday, McConnell will begin the process of setting aside a Democratic filibuster aimed at blocking Gorsuch from being confirmed to the Supreme Court seat that has been vacant since the death last year of conservative icon Antonin Scalia.
McConnell, with the near-unanimous support of the 51 Republicans he leads, will do so via the “nuclear option.” Effectively, the Republicans will break Senate rules to change Senate rules.
The rules require a vote of 67 members to change the rules of the chamber. Republicans will do so with a simple majority, lowering the threshold to kill a filibuster of high court nominees from 60 votes to 51. From there, Republicans will call an up-or-down vote on Gorsuch.
In doing so, this Republican majority will finish the job started by a Democratic majority in November of 2013, under the leadership of Nevada’s Harry Reid. Then, Reid used the nuclear option to reduce the threshold for killing filibusters of all executive branch nominees, except for the Supreme Court, from 60 to 51.
The cascade of events has some senators worried that the legislative filibuster could be the next to go. Both parties claimed opposition to invoking the nuclear option to advance presidential nominees but ended up doing so anyway. But some Republicans say they will go no further.
“Once you go down this path it’s awful easy just to keep going, and that is not a good thing,” Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said in an interview with the Associated Press.
“The legislative filibuster is the long-held tradition of the Senate,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said. “There’s a strong-held view on our side that the legislative filibuster matters. We’ve been in the minority — Republicans have — the last 50 years, 100 years, or maybe 10 years, more than they have.”
Democrats obviously have no current interest in dismantling the legislative filibuster and claim they wouldn’t do so if they are back in power in the Senate.
“No one on our side thinks we should touch it,” Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said. “I hope it’s going to be hands-off.”
