After the Senate Republican minority blocked allowing an up-or-down vote on a completely qualified judicial nominee Wednesday, Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) suggested it may be time to re-open the conversation on filibuster reform. A proposal to doing so — dubbed the “constitutional option” by then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) — was suggested by Senate Republicans as recently as 2005.

Durbin said in a floor speech:

We have tried at the beginning of this Senate session to avoid this kind of filibuster confrontation. The last several years we have had over 400 filibusters — a record number of filibusters in the Senate. I hate to suggest this, but if this is an indication of where we’re headed, we need to revisit the rules again. We need to go back to it again. I’m sorry to say it because I — was hopeful that a bipartisan approach to dealing with these issues would work. It’s the best thing for this chamber, for the people serving here and the history of this institution. But if this Caitlin Halligan nomination is an indication of things to come, we’ve got to revisit the rules.

In 2005, Senate Republicans slammed what they called the “unconstitutional” filibuster of President Bush’s nominees. They proposed a mid-session rules change to eliminate the power of the minority to block nominees with majority support. This “constitutional option” was only dropped when a bipartisan group agreed to only filibuster nominees in the most extreme circumstances.

Earlier this year, several Democratic Senators proposed significant changes to the Senate rules permitting minority obstruction of legislation and confirmation votes. Rather than pushing major changes, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reached an agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for a very modest set of reforms.

Already this year, Senate Republicans have filibustered a bill to limit the harms of the sequester, the confirmation of a former Republican colleague to be Secretary of Defense, and — as of Wednesday — the confirmation of John Brennan to be CIA director.

Wednesday marked the second time, Senate Republicans have blocked a confirmation vote for Caitlin Halligan, an Obama nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dating back to 2011. As 41 Senate Republicans voted to filibuster her, only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted to give her an up-or-down vote.

Two Senators are trying again to close a loophole in federal law that allows for the torturous treatment of potentially hundreds of thousands of puppies around the country. The Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety (PUPS) Act, sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), attempts to close a loophole in the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966 that allows for totally unregulated breeding of puppies for sale online. The AWA requires breeders that sell to pet stores to acquire licenses, but allows them to sell dogs directly to customers without oversight. The Internet has made it possible for breeders to connect directly to consumers, meaning that breeders now double as de facto online pet stores.

This loophole allows “puppy mills,” breeders who aim only at profit and keep puppies in cheap, utterly horrific surroundings, to operate legally and profit handsomely. They sell the puppies directly to happy pet owners, who are oblivious to the fact that their new family member came from a place with “inadequate food and water, [where dogs were housed in] in wire cages with wire flooring so their paws never touch the ground; [and] female dogs mated to produce litter after litter until they can no longer do so and are then killed.” Inspections of two puppy mills in Ohio found, respectively, that “dogs and pups [were] living in horrid conditions and many were sick, emaciated and had visible infections and sores” and “[dogs were] matted with urine, feces and fleas [whose] nails were curled under the pads of feet…Many [had] severe dental disease and 17 [had] eye infections.”

One estimate suggests that several hundred thousand puppy-mill dogs per year are sold online because of the online loophole. Investigators at the International Fund for Animal Welfare asked several experts on puppy mill operations and dog breeding to examine the ads at major online sellers and develop an estimate, based on general characteristics common to puppy mill ads, of how many puppy mill dogs were sold through these websites per year. Their results were shocking:

Using the criteria developed by the expert panel, investigators found that 5,911 of the ads qualified as “likely puppy mill,” which equaled 62% of the ads analyzed from the six dedicated puppy sale websites. Further applying this 10% sample with the 62% “likely puppy mill” findings to the six websites would mean that as many as 57,447 ads and 107,425 individual puppies would potentially be classified as stemming from a “likely puppy mill” on that one day of the investigation…given the conservative nature of the determinations and the strong likelihood that many puppy mill ads were overlooked due to marketing manipulation, the expert panel and investigators felt that the total number of puppies coming from puppy mills may have been significantly underestimated.

The PUPS act would (judging from a draft proposed last legislative session) address this problem by extending the AWA commercial breeder rules to all breeders that sell 50 or more dogs per year and creating new exercise standards requiring breeders to let their dogs move around. The USDA recently proposed its own regulation accomplishing a similar effect last year, but it has yet to be implemented.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that most animals, including dogs, are conscious, feel pain, and have complex internal and emotional lives.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday on voting rights in the wake of the 2012 election, Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz said a “lack of confidence in our elections is one of the reasons people don’t vote,” before citing voter fraud as the primary source of that lack of confidence and touting voter ID laws. “Anyone who says that voter fraud does not exist should look at the numbers that have been produced in a few short months,” he said. Responding to similar testimony from Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) probed senators on what exactly those numbers are:

DURBIN: If you believe, and we all do, that voter fraud is a serious, if not a crime … I would like for both of you to give me the evidence in Iowa and Arizona of convictions for voter fraud that have led to your changes in the law.

SCHULTZ: I think that’s a great question and I think it’s a very difficult question in some ways because not until now have we had resources to even go after this.

DURBIN: I beg your pardon.

SCHULTZ: Not until recently have we as a Secretary of State’s office had resources dedicated towards an investigator to go and do investigations into these crimes.

DURBIN: So excuse me sir. You’re saying that the law was changed in Iowa even before the investigation began?

SCHULTZ: Well let me back up. The law hasn’t been changed in Iowa. Let me address some of your concerns that you say in your opening statement. Iowa has 40 days of early voting. Our polls are open from 7-9 on Election Day. We do everything we can to encourage people to go vote. The question is then, when you have noncitizens who are registered to vote and voting, you have potential people double voting, you have absentee ballot fraud.

DURBIN: Do you have evidence of noncitizens voting in Iowa?

SCHULTZ: Yes, since August 2012, six people have been arrested.

DURBIN: Six. How many have voted since 2012?

SCHULTZ: Well it’s a difficult question because we had identified 3,582 noncitizens who were registered to vote but we weren’t sure if they were still noncitizens.

DURBIN: I’m guessing that millions have voted?

SCHULTZ: 1.6 million.

DURBIN: 1.6 million and there are six cases.

Durbin then followed a similar of questioning with Bennett, who said Arizona had prosecuted 15 cases in the last 18 months out of an estimated 2.3 million voters. Although Durbin asked for numbers of those convicted, the secretaries instead provided the numbers arrested and prosecuted. These miniscule numbers are consistent with figures nationwide. As the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund’s Nina Perales explained during the hearing, most states have reported prosecutions of less than 20 individuals, eclipsing the numbers of people deterred from voting by purge letters informing legitimately registered citizens that they are not eligible to vote.

Watch it:

Schultz was right when he said that Iowa hasn’t yet passed a law. A voter ID bill that passed the House in 2011 never became law. But the state did institute an aggressive purge effort by comparing the voter rolls to driver’s license data — an effort Perales pointed out is grossly misleading:

Secretary Schultz … said he had identified 3,500 noncitizens using the driver’s license rolls. He did not. He identified 3,500 people who were noncitizens at the time that they obtained their driver’s licenses. And we know that since that time and before they registered to vote, the overwhelming majority and perhaps all of them have become naturalized citizens. So at this point, anyone who undertakes to accuse people of non-citizenship based on driver’s licenses should be on notice that this is not correct and should not be done. It’s fundamentally unfair.

Voter fraud efforts like this one nonetheless fueled voter suppression laws and purges around the country this election season, though many of the worst attempts were blocked by courts. The real challenge will come when the U.S. Supreme Court reviews the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in February.