Well, Harry Reid and us. Filibuster reform
started in the brain of our very own David Waldman (KagroX) back in 2005. As
CNN detailed in this great story on the history of filibuster reform, Waldman foresaw the kind of Republican obstruction that came to be in the Obama administration, and knew as well that Democrats could do something about it as long as we could build a big enough coalition on the outside with enough influence on the inside to convince them.
Turns out, one very important Democrat was ultimately convinced. It took a while, but when Harry Reid finally decided to pull the trigger on filibuster reform, he instituted the Reid Rule and made the Senate function, at least partially.
In the aftermath of Sen. Reid's decision to end filibusters on most nominations, the Senate confirmed more than 385 nominees to courts and executive agencies, rendering hollow the hyperbolic claims that eliminating the filibuster for most nominations would destroy civilization as we know it.
If Sen. Reid had not acted, entire government offices would have ceased to function and the judicial branch would have had even more vacancies than it does today, delaying justice for thousands of Americans.
What he also did was help refocus an Obama administration that had let these nominations languish on a back burner for the first few years in office. With filibuster reform on all executive and judicial nominees (save the Supreme Court), Reid and Obama got to work, to
great results.
Freed from the threat of filibusters, Reid pushed through thirteen appeals-court judges in 2013 and 2014, a group of exceptional quality. They included Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard, and Robert Wilkins on the D.C. Circuit. For the first time in decades, that court now has a majority of Democratic appointees. Other confirmations included such luminaries as Pamela Harris (a noted professor and advocate) on the Fourth Circuit, Jill Pryor on the Eleventh, and David Barron (a Harvard law professor and Obama Administration lawyer) on the First. None received more than sixty votes, meaning that they would not have been confirmed had Reid not changed the rules. In future decades, many of these judges will be candidates for promotion if a Democratic President has a Supreme Court vacancy to fill. At the same time, Reid pushed through more than a hundred district-court judges in his last two years as majority leader. Of course, almost all of these judges will serve long after Barack Obama and Harry Reid have left office.
Filibuster reform really encapsulates how the relationship with Reid has been a prickly one for progressives, but also how it's evolved. It took longer than it maybe needed to for Reid to come around to the necessity of going nuclear. On the other hand, it took Reid a long time to convince at least 51 of his Democratic colleagues—enough to enact the reform—that they had to do it. In that effort, he used us and we were happy to be used. He could point to the constant pressure he was under to demonstrate how high a priority reform was and to show unsteady Democrats that we would have their backs. And it worked, resulting in a remade federal judiciary that will have an impact generations from now.