Democrats in the Senate have folded on substantially changing the rules to force the minority to actually filibuster, meaning that everything in the Senate will still be subject to a de-facto 60 vote supermajority requirement. Greg Sargent has the outlines of the deal, which includes legislation to reduce the number of Senate-confirmed positions and which eliminates the "secret" part of "secret holds."
Theoretically, having to make holds public exposes senators to pressure from public opinion, but that's about it. It may reduce the frequency with which Senators put absurd blanket holds on dozens of nominations, but it probably won't change much, particularly for nominees like Goodwin Liu -- whom Republican senators might actually want credit for blocking. No judicial nominees were part of the deal; in fact, this morning Republicans on the Judiciary Committee held over 11 judicial nominations that had previously passed out of committee by unanimous consent, setting back a floor vote on them by at least a week.
“We're very disappointed with the outcome; at the same time, we strongly commend the courageous efforts of Senators Harkin, Udall, and Merkely, who took on a very difficult issue,” says Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal legal group that has been active in pushing the Senate to confirm Obama's judicial nominees. "The importance of what was reached today is mainly symbolic,” Aron said, in terms of placing filibuster reform at the center of the conversation.
The situation with judicial nominations remains pretty dire: Twenty-two states are facing "judicial emergencies," and lower courts are facing more than a hundred vacancies. Yet there are 42 nominees on the Senate floor awaiting confirmation. The situation is so dire that Republican-appointed judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts, have been reduced to begging the Senate to do something about it.
The Obama administration has dragged its feet on putting forth judicial nominees, but the nominees they've put forth have been subject to unprecedented obstruction, and even the original proposal wasn't as ambitious as it should have been in reforming holds. Republican obstruction has meant that the courts have retained a partisan imbalance--almost 60 percent of federal judges are Republican-appointed. Given the partisan breakdown in the way judges have ruled on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the importance of putting more Democratic nominees on the bench has never been more clear.
"This is just the end of round one," Aron said. "This is not the end."
