Ralph Nader: "Why aren't the Democrats landsliding today's Republicans?"

[ellisonz]

66. It wasn't a question of caving or not caving.

It was a matter or preserving the institutional integrity of the Senate in accordance with the principle of checks and balances. It also wasn't SCOTUS nominees.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) reached out to a number of colleagues on both sides to compromise by winning confirmation of some of the disputed nominees (Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, and Priscilla Owen) while preserving the judicial filibuster on William Myers and Henry Saad.[56] Their efforts succeeded on the evening of May 23, 2005, one day before the cloture vote. They announced an agreement by seven Republican and seven Democratic Senators to avert a vote on the nuclear option while preserving the filibuster for "extraordinary circumstances."[57] The block of senators who agreed to the compromise included Republicans John McCain, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Warner of Virginia, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike DeWine of Ohio, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island; and Democrats Nelson, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Ken Salazar of Colorado. This group was quickly dubbed "the Gang of 14" in various blogs and news outlets. McCain, Chafee, Collins, and Snowe were already on record as opposing the nuclear option, leaving the Democrats two votes short of defeating an attempt to trigger it (they would have needed 51 votes to override Vice President Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote).

The bipartisan group was large enough to deny Frist the 50 votes he needed to trigger the nuclear option, and also large enough to reach cloture on a Democratic filibuster. It states, in part:
“ ...we commit to oppose the rules changes in the 109th Congress, which we understand to be any amendment to or interpretation of the Rules of the Senate that would force a vote on a judicial nomination by means other than unanimous consent or Rule XXII. ”

Democrats in the Gang agreed not to filibuster the judges listed in the agreement (save in "extraordinary" circumstances) and Republicans in the Gang agreed not to vote for the nuclear option. The definition of what constituted an "extraordinary" circumstance was left up to the individual senator. For example, Graham and DeWine let it be known that they did not consider nominations to the Supreme Court to fit the definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option#Gang_of_14

They compromised, which is the foundation of our government, and to destroy the Filibuster would result in the tyranny of a simple majority over a minority.