| The Republicans know how useful the current rules are for them and would never give up such an advantage until they had to in order to win some bigger fight.
The filibuster is not a knife that "cuts both ways" - or at least a knife that cuts both ways even close to equally. Aside from the long history of the thing where it is almost always used in support of conservative aims (really, try to name an important conservative item filibustered by liberal Senators, I have to go back to Huey Long to even find a candidate worth discussing), the filibuster theoretically favours conservatives for two big reasons:
First that since conservatives tend to represent the interests of the wealthy and powerful, these interests are satisfied to have government do nothing as they have enough power already to go about their business of acquiring more power and wealth. They will gladly accept government help when they can get it, but they don't usually need it. Mostly what the filibuster is good for is vetoing measures that would see government act to help the powerless which always comes at expense of the powerful.
Second is that most conservative priorities can already be passed under reconciliation rules, which circumvent the filibuster for "budget" items (like tax cuts). There was a lot of discussion about what parts of the health care reform could or should have been passed under reconciliation. The existence of that debate became obvious cover for conservadems to oppose using reconciliation for the public option or other liberal ideas for the bill, meanwhile Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were both passed using reconciliation.
So even before we get to discussions of the gutlessness, cowardice or just plain believing in conservativism on the part of too many Democratic Senators we already have the filibuster as a loaded die before the players even reach the table.
The 2005 filibuster fight over judicial nominees tells us how this fight will really go: Republicans will end the filibuster if necessary to get the things they want. When they threatened to do so, enough Democrats backed down and gave them what they wanted so that it wasn't necessary. Even then they weren't going to nuke the entire filibuster, but rather the artificial category of "judicial" filibusters they invented out of whole cloth so that they could preserve legislative filibusters which advantage them so much.
Of course it would have been much better for the Democrats if they had let the Republicans do this, since many many more of Obama's lower court nominees would have been confirmed and Democrats wouldn't have let down the netroots when they failed to filibuster Alito since no such thing would be possible. In exchange, the same horrible Bush nominees that were confirmed would have been confirmed. Zero downside, much upside.
Don't get me wrong, if a bill repealing Social Security is on the table and the filibuster is the last obstacle to President Gingrich signing it, they'll nuke it in a flash, but they won't do it on the first day of Congress or any such thing. They know they can use the nuclear option whenever needed and they know the "process" stories written about such an event will only be followed by a small fraction of the nation anyway. |
STATE BLOGS
