D.C. 'Centrist' Pundits Horrified That Senate Is a Little Less Gridlocked [View all]

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http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/embrace-your-small-penis-its-not-actually-small

Harry Reid, you may have heard lately, invoked “the nuclear option,” and eliminated the Senate’s much-abused 60-vote threshold for executive appointments and judges, the Supreme Court exempted. The response from a certain breed of pundit has been a sort of resigned sadness. “Oh, sure, it seems like a reasonable and justified response to unprecedented obstruction,” these pundits sigh, “but what a tragedy, for America, that this not-actually-that-old tradition of allowing a legislative minority to block all executive appointments and nominations for no reason has to end.” Three separate Washington Post columnists essentially wrote exactly this column.

Ruth Marcus’ is perhaps most representative. It begins by explaining, with admirable clarity, exactly why the rules change was made — the previous filibuster deal was supposed to save the tactic for “extraordinary circumstance,” and Republicans had clearly and repeatedly violated that agreement — and it concedes that the Senate wasn’t functioning before the change:

And the argument that deploying the “nuclear option” to change the rules by majority vote will “break” the Senate has long lost its persuasive force. The Senate is broken. It can’t get much worse.

So, that’s it, column over, right? No. The Democrats went too far! And they will regret it.