Today Senate Republicans voted to change the rules for approval of Supreme Court nominees. No longer is a 60-vote majority—or what’s called a supermajority—required. Now all that’s needed is a simple majority, 51 votes.
Without question, this is a big deal. Longtime Senate precedent held that the high bar for confirmations for the Supreme Court was sacrosanct.
Also without question: Democrats, led by then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid, started this ball rolling in 2013, when they made the exact same reform for judicial appointments at the Federal level (as well as for presidential appointments, which is its own ticking time bomb).
“It’s a sad day in the history of the Senate,” McConnell said to reporters at the time.
Arguably, it’s a happier one today. Republicans have their man; the GOP gets Gorsuch, and the Democrats, much as they might whine, are living down the raw deal they dealt the other side four years ago.
And yet, we keep thinking back to what Heather Wilhelm, columnist for the National Review, said on the show a few days ago:
“I want to see Gorsuch confirmed,” Wilhelm said, “but there’s some dangerous territory we’re getting into as well. Whatever powers the GOP gives itself, that’s gonna hit back when Democrats get the majority.”
It’s true. The GOP needs to remember where it stood in 2013, helplessly watching while a Progressive president steamrolled the Constitution, and Democrats handed him broader and broader powers to do so. They should realize that whatever powers they grant to themselves now are half-held by unconscionable liberals in some future Congress too awful to fathom.
That gives us an idea. What if Senate Republicans now led the charge for reform of the judicial nomination process, as well as the length of judicial terms, to ensure this doesn’t benefit either side inordinately?
What if Mitch McConnell submitted the following to the Senate floor?
Proposed: that the President shall appoint, and the Senate approve, by a 55-vote majority, Supreme Court Justices.
Would the Democrats show some sense and accept?
Hard to say. But if the Republicans want to make sure Gorsuch’s ideological opposite—some quack from the Ninth Circuit who sees microaggressions on every dog-eared page of the Constitution—can’t skate into the Supreme Court on the strength of a simple majority, they may want to do what they can to correct for that outcome.
A 55-vote majority might be able to take care of that. It’s not a supermajority, which, it can be argued, is too high for these partisan times. But it’s not too low, either.
It’s possible that such a compromise is the best way for the GOP to put the Humpty Dumpty of Senate decorum back together again. Somehow, we still have to pick our way through the rubble and eke out an existence.



