Mitch McConnell wasn’t bluffing. While still Senate minority leader, the Kentucky Republican warned then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., not to go nuclear, not to end the filibuster for a few relatively minor executive nominees. “You’ll regret this,” McConnell said. “You may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”
Democrats didn’t listen.
Reid went nuclear, even threw himself a little party off of the floor of the Senate, and celebrated then-President Barack Obama’s picks to lead the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
That was five years ago. McConnell is the only one celebrating now, because McConnell, like he promised, would finish what Reid started. After the presidential election, I wrote that Reid “had wheeled an armed warhead into Congress.” Since then, McConnell has used the launch codes to demolish everything and prohibit Democrats from offering any kind of meaningful advice or consent.
First, there was Neil Gorsuch. McConnell ended the judicial filibuster to send him to the Supreme Court.
More recently, there was Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel. Democrats didn’t like either. They said Pompeo was a bigot not fit to serve as secretary of state and Haspel was a torturer not fit to lead the CIA. It didn’t matter. After ending the filibuster in 2013, there was nothing Democrats could do.
