"How much worse can it get?” If the GOP has a say, it can get a whole lot worse!

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Saxby Chambliss, Johnny Isakson weigh in on the 'nuclear' Senate
By Daniel Malloy, November 21, 2013

U.S. Senate Democrats today changed the filibuster rules in order to make it easier to confirm President Barack Obama's nominees, a maneuver known as the "nuclear option" that has been oft threatened but never before deployed.

The rule change means it only takes 51 votes instead of 60 to break a filibuster on executive branch and judicial -- though not Supreme Court -- nominees. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said it won't be long before the rule applies to all bills and nominees:

"It’s just  a shame that Harry Reid had to resort to this to deflect away from Obamacare. That’s the real issue that people care about right now. What he’s done here is just change the whole dynamics of the Senate. And instead of caring about legislation that’s important to the American people, what he’s now done is made it an awful lot easier for additional disasters like Obamacare to get passed -- because that’s where this is headed. It’s limited just to judges, but we know where it’s going."

Fellow Georgia Republican Johnny Isakson agreed that the move was an attempt to distract from bad Obamacare headlines, and that it will change the character of the upper chamber:

"It’s the saucer that cools the spilt coffee out of the hot cup. It’s the backstop where you can stop to take a pause, to take a deep breath. It’s a body that has continuity because it only turns over a third, a third, a third over a six-year cycle. And what you do by changing the rules of the Senate and taking away that ability to be thoughtful and deliberate is, you end up with a Senate that can be a runaway Senate as much as you can have a House that’s a runaway House. And that’s not good for the country."

When asked what's next, Isakson indicated that even if the Republicans take over the Senate after the 2014 elections, he would like to see the old rules return:

"I think you need to be where you are where you’re in the majority as well as the minority. If we think something’s wrong when they’re in the majority and based on principle it also ought to be wrong when we’re in the majority. ... I’d like to see consistency. Sometimes in a legislative body it can be very hard to be consistent. It depends on where the power is. But in the end, you’ve got to be fair, you’ve got to be right and you’ve got to be consistent."

My colleague Aaron Gould Sheinin spoke to Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, who sees this as an "historic" moment. Said Abramowitz:

“Clearly this is just going to exacerbate the partisan divide. But the way the majority felt was things had gotten so bad they weren’t going to get anything done. The risk was worth taking. How much worse can it get?”

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