When the Nuclear Option is the Only Option

In the wake of the Senate’s failure to repeal Obamacare, President Trump has proposed that the Senate change the rules to abolish the filibuster and allow all legislative initiatives to pass with a simple majority.   President Trump hopes that abolishing the filibuster will allow the Republicans to pass a more comprehensive bill that will allow people to purchase insurance across state lines.  As long as the filibuster remains in existence, 60 votes would be required to pass such a bill.  Considering the fact that nearly all Democrats have united to destroy the Trump Presidency and protect Obamacare, amassing 60 votes for any bill that would repeal part or all of Obamacare is a pipe dream.  That’s why Senate Republicans have tried to pass a series of lackluster repeal bills using the budget reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority.   The filibuster has already been abolished for all judicial nominations. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the so-called “nuclear option” for judicial nominations in 2013; but this only applied to lower court nominees.  Supreme Court nominees could still be filibustered.  That changed earlier this year when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invoked the nuclear option for Supreme Court nominees. Should President Trump’s idea manage to win the support of enough Senators, the minority party would see its power in the upper chamber greatly diminish. I guess that would make it all the more important for Republicans to hold onto their majority.

 

Republicans have learned the hard way that it is much easier to be an opposition party than it is to actually govern.  The same principle that applies in dating also applies in politics: nice guys finish last.  Republicans frequently make the mistake of bringing a knife to a gun fight and then wonder why they keep getting humiliated.  This metaphor is actually quite ironic considering both parties’ stances on guns and the Second Amendment.  Republicans let the Democrats walk all over them for much of the Bush Administration; sitting idly by as the Democrats used the filibuster to block President Bush’s judicial nominees, most notably Miguel Estrada.  In the past year, the Republicans have managed to occasionally show some backbone; such as when they refused to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.  The media and the left surely did not like it but the Republican base certainly did.  The promise of a conservative justice to replace Antonin Scalia led many Americans who may not have necessarily liked Donald Trump to vote for him. In today’s hyper-partisan era, going nuclear seems like the only way anything representing the budget proposed earlier this year reaches the President’s desk.  Otherwise, the budget will look just like the continuing resolution that passed earlier this year, funding nearly all of the Democrats’ legislative priorities while doing very little to please the Republicans.  Ronald Reagan did say “If you got seventy-five to eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say you take it and fight for the rest later.”  However, today’s Republicans often settle for far less.  Republicans have repeatedly promised to defund Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, and sanctuary cities.  However, the continuing resolution funded all of these items while not funding President Trump’s signature campaign promise: the border wall.  That continuing resolution seemed to contain seventy-five to eighty percent of what the Republicans were not asking for.      

 

Perhaps the Republicans always cave to the Democrats because of their fear of receiving the blame for a government shutdown.  If nothing else good comes out of it, a government shutdown puts the spotlight on how wasteful and inefficient our Federal government actually is. Even in a government shutdown, essential employees still report to work.  It’s the “non-essential” employees that get to stay home.  As Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld so aptly pointed out during the last government shutdown, in the private sector, a non-essential employee would be a non-employee. Private business owners are conscientious of their operating expenses; unlike the carefree Federal government, which acts as if money grows on trees.  Expressing his disappointment with the continuing resolution passed earlier this year, President Trump actually embraced the idea of a government shutdown; saying “Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix this mess!”      

 

The founders new that a supermajority threshold would create gridlock; which is precisely why they advocated against it. Abolishing the legislative filibuster would not create a Constitutional Crisis, since the filibuster is not mandated by the Constitution.  Then again, most Democrats as well as the mainstream media think that President Trump himself is a Constitutional Crisis.     

 

At this point, it seems unlikely that the Senate will change the rules to abolish the filibuster.  More than 60 Senators sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer advocating the preservation of the legislative filibuster, which McConnell has said he has no intention of eliminating.  More than half of Senate Republicans signed the letter.    Many of the same Democratic Senators who signed the letter probably advocated for eliminating the filibuster while President Obama was in office.  While we’re on the subject of abolishing things, there are two more things that ought to be abolished: Congress’s exemption from Obamacare and the August recess.  If Obamacare was so great, you would think that members of Congress would want to take part in it.  After all, they created it.  But working in the swamp means you get special privileges, including healthcare completely subsidized by the American taxpayer.  What a nice gig.  No wonder the calls for term limits never go anywhere.

 

The voters are not going to reward the Republicans with a participation trophy. If they fail to enact President Trump’s agenda, they will suffer the consequence of failing to win re-election.  Republicans have a tendency to avoid playing the game of politics, mistakenly thinking they can rise above it.  If they refuse to play the game, they will always lose it.  Even if it’s a last resort, Republicans should not take the nuclear option off the table.