About damned time, IMHO... here's TPM's Sahil Kapur:
After years of threats and warnings, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and his Democratic majority on Thursday executed the "nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster for executive branch and judicial nominees, except for the Supreme Court.
Fifty-two Democrats voted against upholding the filibuster rules after Republicans again blocked cloture on the nomination of Patricia Millett to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Democratic Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI), Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Mark Pryor (D-AR) voted with Republicans to sustain the filibuster rules.
"Republicans have routinely used the filibuster to prevent President Obama from appointing his executive team or confirming judges," Reid said on the Senate floor. "We're burning wasted hours and wasted days between filibusters. I could say instead we're burning wasted days and wasted weeks between filibusters. ... It's time to change. It's time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete."
...
"Is the Senate working now? Can anyone say the Senate is working now?" the majority leader said before the vote. "I don't think so."
The "Reid Rule," as supporters are calling it, does not affect the minority party's ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees or legislation.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) fumed at Reid's decision, accusing him of trying to change the subject from Obamacare and "cook up some fake fight over judges." He argued that "by any objective standard, Senate Republicans have been very, very fair to this president" when it comes to letting him appoint his nominees.
Excuse me, Mr. Minority Leader, but...
bullshit. Time after time, the GOP has filibustered Obama's nominations, offering no substantive complaint about the nominee, filibustering for no other reason than that it was Obama who nominated him/her.
Regular readers know I am not particularly fond of Obama, and I have not always been fond of his nominees, either. But McConnell's whining and grousing notwithstanding, tradition is that presidents have been served by the officials they have nominated, typically (though not always) of their own party, the filibuster being reserved only for the most extremist of individuals, the deliberate sharp stick in the eye, the person nominated for no other reason than to create discord. Whatever else he has done, Obama has not nominated people for the purpose of pure aggravation of Republicans. But Dog knows Republicans have filibustered his nominees for pure aggravation of Obama, not for any substantive flaw in the nominees.
I regret only that Reid waited so painfully long to trigger the H-bomb. And Republicans? They can go suck on corkscrews until the points come out the backs of their necks.
ASIDE: the bomb in the picture above was accidentally (!) dropped near Albuquerque in 1957, very nearly taking out the city and an air force base
^[added] with its conventional explosives alone^. At least we can be relatively confident that Reid's nuke was no accident.
