The gutting of the Senate filibuster is a huge victory for progressives.

[DonViejo]

How Democrats Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

The gutting of the Senate filibuster is a huge victory for progressives.

By David Weigel

No one can agree how the Judicial Wars started. Most pundits sigh deeply and start with the defeat of Robert Bork, who wasn’t actually filibustered—only 42 senators voted for his 1987 nomination. Others pick up the story in the 1990s, when Republicans ran the Senate and stymied Bill Clinton. One can, as most Republicans prefer to do, remember what happened in 2005, when Republicans wanted to end filibusters on judicial nominees and every Democrat—including our current president—predicted nuclear fallout, brimstone, and exploding skulls.

We do know how the Senate came to change its rules today, a vote that represented the biggest victory for the left since the election of President Barack Obama. That process started in the first weeks of 2009, after a Democratic landslide mighty enough to sweep even Al Franken into the upper house. The Republicans, who’d held 55 seats during the 2005 “nuclear option” fight, were down to 41. A new class of Democrats, including Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall, buckled in for action.

They got a slog. An economic stimulus package, once expected to get up to 80 votes, got over the 60-vote cloture line only with huge concessions to three Republicans. A simple omnibus parks funding bill took weeks to pass. Then, in May, just enough Republicans held together to filibuster the president’s nominee for deputy secretary of the Interior. To Majority Leader Harry Reid’s surprise, the Democratic left honed in quickly on the filibuster, demanding that he change it.

“The progressive media started pounding on Reid very early in the process—I’m talking post-2008—to engage or to execute the so-called nuclear option,” remembers Reid’s then chief of staff Jim Manley. “I’d be getting phone calls from the Huffington Post once in a while about it. We did roundtables with progressive media where it was raised. Sen. Reid held regular meetings with the freshmen to get their input and ideas on Senate matters, and this was always at the top of their agenda.”

full article
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/11/harry_reid_and_filibuster_reform_the_nuclear_option_is_a_huge_victory_for.html?wpisrc=newsletter_slatest_morning_newsletter

[RBInMaine]

1. Now if only the "Progressives" will now go and vote in 2014, work on campaigns, and defend the ACA.

Yes, DEFEND the ACA as it is a very good step in the right direction and the best that could PASS in 2010.

[last1standing]

2. As has been repeatedly proved, Progressives DO vote.

It's the "pragmatists" who seem to be our problem.