The Republican Bluff Finally Got Called

It was well past time to end years and years of inexcusable partisan obstruction. The Republicans are unlikely ever again to be in the majority, and so it was time:

It’s hard not to see the Senate rule change Thursday as too little, too late. Liberals wanted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to push to end the filibuster at the start of this Senate session, but he at least twice relied on a handshake deal with Mitch McConnell that Republicans would stop their unprecedented obstruction campaign against President Obama’s nominees.

Of course, “everybody” knew how that would turn out, but “everybody” doesn’t sit in the Senate; it wasn’t until recently that tragically cautious Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Max Baucus came around.

...Now, on the heels of Reid holding his fractious and often cowardly caucus together last month, to stop the GOP’s government shutdown and debt-ceiling hostage taking, it looks like Democrats are finally learning that appeasing bullies only enables them.

Listening to McConnell and Sen. Chuck Grassley rail against the Democrats’ power grab in the Senate on Thursday, you almost had to admire their chutzpah and capacity for projection – and their trust that the media would let them get away with it. Grassley really has himself to blame: by crusading against Obama’s right to fill vacancies in the crucial but conservative-dominated D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, brazenly calling it “court-packing,” he finally convinced moderate Democrats that they were dealing with unreasonable power-mad adversaries.