Why The Senate STILL Isn’t Able To Get Anything Done Even After The ‘Nuclear Option’
BY IAN MILLHISER
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
In 2013, the Senate adopted two of the most significant changes to its rules in nearly 40 years. The first significantly reduced the amount of time senators in the minority can delay a confirmation vote before it can move forward. The second effectively reduced the amount of votes required to confirm nearly all presidential nominees from 60 to 51 votes. Senators in the minority now have fewer opportunities to frustrate Senate confirmations than at any point in the Senate’s recent history.
At yet judicial confirmations remain at a standstill. Just one judge has been confirmed so far in 2014, and this judge was a holdover from the November 2013 fight that led to Democrats invoking the so-called “nuclear option.” Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) began the process necessary to confirm four judges on Wednesday night, but this process will still take days to complete and will only confirm a small fraction of the 32 judicial nominees awaiting votes. Even after the transformative changes last year brought to the Senate’s rules, the Senate still isn’t working. Routine confirmations are not moving forward.
Franz Kafka’s Senate
The key to understanding why is to first understand how the Senate’s rules create roadblocks to progress even without requiring a supermajority to get anything done. Although Senate Democrats reduced the number of votes required to confirm a judge last November, they didn’t actually eliminate the filibuster. Absent unanimous consent from every single senator, confirming a judicial nominee still requires two votes. First, a majority of the Senate must vote to invoke “cloture” on the nominee — that’s the process that used to require 60 votes but now only requires 51. After this cloture vote succeeds, a fairly small number of senators can force hours of delay before an actual confirmation vote can be held. For relatively low-ranking trial judges, there’s only two hours of delay between cloture and a final vote. But for the more powerful court of appeals judges, up to 30 hours of time can be wasted before the final confirmation vote takes place. (Moreover, the rule that reduces the confirmation time for trial judges sunsets in January — meaning that even the lowest ranking judges could also require 30 hours to confirm next year).
And that’s just two of the hoops Senate Democrats have to jump through in order to confirm a judge. Before a cloture vote can take place, sixteen senators need to sign a “cloture petition,” present that petition on the floor, and then wait more than a day for the petition to “ripen.” If the Senate is currently debating a piece of legislation, it is not allowed to shift gears to focus on a nomination unless it agrees to shift into something known as “executive session.” And, as an aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tells ThinkProgress, Republicans started insisting that the full Senate hold a vote every time it switches in and out of executive session.
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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/02/13/3273391/senate-nuclear-option/
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