The first change in decades in how the Senate approves presidential nominees,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s move to end filibusters for most executive nominations Thursday led to an escalation of partisan warfare.
“This is the most important and most dangerous revision of Senate rules since Thomas Jefferson wrote them at the beginning of our country,” Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, said after Thursday’s vote.
Over the objections of the chamber’s Republicans, the Senate voted Thursday to alter its rules to let a simple majority confirm all nominees except Supreme Court justices, ending a 38-year practice by which a single senator could require 60 votes to install presidential picks.
“A majority of senators believe, as I believe, that enough is enough,” President Obama said Thursday. “The gears of government have to work.”
Since the nation was founded, half of the 168 nominees delayed in the Senate using the procedure were Obama’s selections, Reid said.
“Is there anything fair about that?” he said before the debate and vote. “The American people believe the Senate is broken, and I believe the American people are right.”
Democrats are incensed that Republicans blocked the nomination of Representative Mel Watt, a North Carolina Democrat tapped to head the agency that oversees government-chartered mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The Oct. 31 rejection of Watt’s nomination, the first time a sitting member of Congress had been denied confirmation to a major executive-branch post since 1843, has led the party base to pressure Reid to alter the rules.
