WASHINGTON - The Senate voted Thursday to eliminate the use of the filibuster against most presidential nominees, a move that will break the Republican blockade of President Barack Obama’s picks to Cabinet posts and the federal judiciary. The change is the most fundamental shift in the way the Senate functions in more than a generation.
The vote was one that members of both parties had threatened for the better part of a decade but had always stopped short of carrying out. It establishes that executive branch and lower-court nominations need 51 votes rather than 60 for confirmation.
The vote was 52-48. Both of Arkansas’ senators voted against the move.
Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, set the change in motion Thursday with a series of procedural steps.
“The need for change is so, so very obvious. It is clearly visible,” Reid said as the Senate convened Thursday morning. “It is time to get the Senate working.”
After the vote on the filibuster rules, Reid said he would not gloat. “This is not a time for celebration,” he said.
On that, but little else, Republicans agreed. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the change marked a “devastating” breach of Senate procedure.
“Now there are no rules in the United States Senate,” he said.
Obama applauded the move to end what he called “an unprecedented pattern of obstruction” of his judicial and Cabinet nominees by Republicans.
“I realize that neither party has been blameless for these tactics. They developed over the years,” Obama said at the White House. “But today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal. It’s not what our founders envisioned. A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to re-fight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations, we can’t let it become normal.”
Like Democratic leaders in the Senate, Obama, a former senator himself, declined to characterize the rule change as a victory to be celebrated. Instead, he argued that it was a necessary move, made reluctantly, to help fix a broken system that had blocked or threatened not only nominees to the courts and his administration but also legislation on job initiatives, gun violence, immigration changes and women’s rights.
The rule would allow a majority vote to confirm judicial and executive nominees short of the Supreme Court.
Besides high court nominations, the filibuster change, approved with a simple majority under a procedural move so contentious that it is known as the nuclear option, also does not affect legislation, which would still be subject to a 60-vote threshold if filibustered.
The two senators from Arkansas questioned the long term ramifications of changing the vote threshold.
U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor was one of three Democrats to vote against changing the rule. He said on the Senate floor that the change makes it harder for senators to work together.
Pryor said the previous Senate rules let senators work for the interest of their states.
“It’s the only place where the minority is guaranteed a voice. They sometimes get outvoted, but they’re guaranteed at least to be heard, and I think that’s important,” he said.
Pryor said use of “the nuclear option” was misguided, adding, “I think that it could do permanent damage here to this institution and could have some negative ramifications for our country and for the American people
Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., said senators had been able to employ the 60-vote threshold if they had doubts about a nominee.
“It will profoundly change the Senate,” he said. “You could require a 60-vote threshold, and that would give an incentive for an agency to answer your question.”
He called the rule change a “strong-arm tactic” to shift attention from the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
“It’s just a raw grab for power, and it’s just simply inappropriate,” he said.
Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, also denounced the Democrats’ move to “break the rules to change the rules” as a way to distract the public from the president’s political problems regarding his health-care law.
“You think this is in the best interest of the United States Senate and the American people?” McConnell asked, sounding incredulous. “I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”
The gravity of the situation was reflected in a highly unusual scene on the Senate floor: Nearly all 100 senators were in their seats, rapt as their two leaders debated.
“This is the most important and most dangerous revision of Senate rules since Thomas Jefferson wrote them at the beginning of our country,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said after the vote.
Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said the move “diminishes the power of the Senate to join with the executive in making certain decisions that are unique to our government.”
Maine Republican Susan Collins, a Republican who often works with Democrats, said Reid’s decision to exercise the option was “absolutely” an overreaction.
“And one that I predict he will rue the day at some point,” she said.
Tensions between the two parties have reached a boiling point in the past few weeks as Republicans repeatedly filibustered Obama’s picks to the country’s most important appeals court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate has voted on three nominees to the court in the past month. Republicans have blocked them all, saying they would allow the president no more appointments to that court.
Reid said Republican obstruction had left him no other option. Since the nation was founded, half of the 168 nominees delayed in the Senate using the procedure were Obama’s selections, Reid said. “Is there anything fair about that?” he said before the debate and vote. “The American people believe the Senate is broken, and I believe the American people are right.” Obama said that in the six decades before he became president, 20 nominees to executive branch positions were filibustered, but that in less than five years, nearly 30 of his choices had been “treated this way.” “This year alone, for the first time in history, Senate Republicans filibustered a president’s nominee for the secretary of defense who used to be a Republican senator,” Obama said.
That effort against Chuck Hagel was unsuccessful, as was another filibuster against Obama’s nominee to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, but Republicans did succeed in blocking Obama’s pick to regulate housing, he said.
“In each of these cases, it’s not been because they opposed the person - that there was some assessment that they were unqualified, that there was some scandal that had been unearthed,” Obama said. “It was simply because they opposed the policies that the American people voted for in the last election. This obstruction gets even worse when it comes to the judiciary.”
Democrats, who filibustered their own share of Republican judicial nominees before they took control of the Senate, have said that what the minority party has done is to effectively rewrite the law by requiring a 60-vote supermajority threshold for high-level presidential appointments. Once rare, filibusters of high-level nominees are now routine.
With the appeals court left with a bench of just eight full-time judges - there are 11 full-time seats - Democrats argue that Republicans are denying Obama his constitutional powers to appoint judges and reshaping the nature of the federal judiciary.
Thursday’s vote was the most significant change to filibuster practices since 1975, when senators abandoned a bid to end debate with a simple majority and instead lowered the threshold to 60 from 67.
Senators in 1964 began regularly using the so-called cloture rule, adopted in 1917, to stop debate after ending the record 57-day filibuster of civil-rights legislation. Since then, the tactic has been used with increasing frequency as a way to block or delay legislation.
The effect of the Senate’s move Thursday was almost immediately evident as Democrats moved forward on the nomination of one of the court nominees whom Republicans had recently rejected. By 55-43, the Senate voted to cut off debate on the nomination of Patricia Millett, a Washington lawyer who has worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations.
In that vote, Pryor voted in favor of cutting off debate, while Boozman voted against.
Democrats are expected to start approving the two remaining appeals court judges after the Senate returns from its Thanksgiving recess.
The president’s nomination of two federal district judges for Arkansas also are pending before the Senate, along with more than a dozen other judicial nominees. The Arkansas candidates received bipartisan support in committee and from Boozman and Pryor. The Senate Executive Calendar lists dozens of nominations that the U.S. Senate has not voted on.
One nomination on the calendar has been waiting for a vote since Feb. 26. With passage of the rule change, supporters hope to speed up the process.
Information for this article was contributed by Jeremy W. Peters, Ashley Parker and Jackie Calmes of The New York Times; by Kathleen Hunter, Cheyenne Hopkins, Laura Litvan, Michael Shepard, James Rowley and Derek Wallbank of Bloomberg News; and by Sarah D. Wire of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/22/2013