After lunch one day, Majority Leader Harry Reid wheeled an armed warhead into the Senate. Republicans shrieked, Democrats grinned, and the left-wing media cheered as a parliamentary mushroom cloud billowed over the upper chamber. Just off the floor, Reid threw a little party for liberal activists.
The Senate had gone nuclear, pulverizing every obstacle that the minority party had erected against President Obama’s executive and judicial nominees. Tragically for the party of Jefferson, that strike has probably sealed the fate of Senate Democrats.
Three years later, Republicans hold the Senate and the White House. Reid is about to enter retirement with radiation sickness. Thanks to him, there is one less obstacle between Republicans and the full toppling of Obama’s legacy.
President-elect Trump and Senate Majority Leader McConnell are expected to follow Reid’s example. His decision to change Senate procedure neutralizes a minority’s filibuster by allowing the Senate to decide on cabinet nominees and lower judicial posts by a simple majority. Infusing direct democracy into the deliberative body risks repercussions like the kind Democrats are about to endure.
Thanks to Reid’s decision, the only limit on Trump’s cabinet choices will be what Senate Republicans are willing to tolerate. Education Secretary Palin? Unlikely, perhaps. Not impossible.
But the bigger problem, beyond just the cabinet and the judiciary, is that Reid chose to change Senate rules with a simple majority vote. That puts Democrats at McConnell’s mercy. If Republicans trying to Make America Great Again lack restraint and follow Reid’s path to its logical conclusion, then Democrats won’t be able to stop them from going nuclear on Supreme Court justice nominees or even everyday legislation. It’ll be political Armageddon.
Before the vote, Reid and his chief lieutenants had plenty of bipartisan warning. Before the vote to go nuclear, McConnell threatened Reid that “you’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.” The Kentucky Republican wasn’t alone.
Democrat Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan pled with Reid before his decision to go nuclear. He did so out of fear for what the move would mean to the Senate. Allow the chamber to go nuclear, he warned, and “the hard-won protections and benefits of our people’s health and welfare will be lost.”
A media that learned to love the nuclear option made certain that those warnings weren’t heard. In the run up to the crisis, Salon’s Brian Beutler (now at The New Republic) demanded “Harry Reid go nuclear.” The New York Times’ Juliet Lapidos explained why he “had to go nuclear.”
Only Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Pryor of Arkansas joined Levin in voting no. They were right, but it didn’t matter. Reid’s rule change passed 52-48.
Come January, Republicans will be looking for revenge. Arguments about the rights of a Senate minority will get as much of a hearing as Republicans are willing to give them. If Republicans want, they can follow Reid’s example and turn the greatest deliberative body in the world into a wasteland, and Obama’s legacy into a handful of dust.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
