Sen. Reid Deploys the Nuclear Option, for All the Right Reasons

This wasn't a casual or an ill-considered decision, and the Republicans who have whined that Democrats will "be sorry" when the shoe is on the other foot can actually just stuff it. The treatment of this particular administration's appointees has been uniquely fraught with holds, and the saddest thing about this has been that this has had little to nothing to do with the fitness of those nominees to take the positions for which they have been selected. It has had everything to do with the challenge by the Republicans in office to the legitimacy of the Chief Executive to even make those appointments, and it has been a travesty, and it is reasonable that the joke ends, now. Democrats have been accepting of Republican appointees--the warning that a future GOP-president-selected SCOTUS bench might be chock full of Scalias and Thomases misses the point entirely:



The Democrats in the past allowed a Scalia here, a Thomas there. They didn't go to the wall to obstruct judicial nominees to the extent seen recently, and in the one event (Bork) that Democrats did their best to keep a radical right-winger off the bench, it was unusual enough in and of itself to become a verb for Senate rejection of a radical nominee for something. And that itself was some time ago.

What they are grousing about now isn't the threat that they will so fuck the Democrat's shit up when they get a Senate majority again; they are grousing about the loss of a brilliant look-busy fund-raising tool they were all about just  this past minute. Obstructing the filling of judicial and executive office vacancies looks like work, doesn't it? It's a blow at the Obama "Agenda" that we might otherwise call "doing his Constitutionally authorized job".  It's a kind of cheap grace for entering Tea Party heaven.

The lies that Sen. McConnell, for example, wants to pretend are true, regarding the "fake fight"  over judges, quite ignored the genunely fake claim that the GOP has been using that filling existing vacancies is somehow "packing the court". 

Something had to give. I think they did the right thing.