(Credit: AP)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) expects a showdown in July over a potential second round of filibuster reform, and he’s prepared to push for a sweeping change to the minority’s ability to unilaterally obstruct judges and other nominees. According to reporting by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Reid “is eyeing a change to the rules that would do away with the 60-vote threshold on all judicial and executive branch nominations.” The test, according to Sargent, of whether Reid will push this reform is whether Senate Republicans lift their blockades on Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, Labor Secretary nominee Tom Perez, and Environmental Protection Agency leader-in-waiting Gina McCarthy.

While Reid’s apparent willingness to press serious filibuster reform is welcome, he made similar statements during the lead up to a debate over filibuster reform last January. That debate ultimately led to a weak package of reforms and a victory for Republicans. A minority of Senate Democrats, lead by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), refused to support reforms that would enable the Senate to function in the face of a determined obstructionist minority.

This time around, however, there are two reasons why Reid may be successful in pulling together the 51 votes necessary to achieve real reform. The first is the simple fact that Levin is retiring, so he can no longer approach colleagues as a powerful committee chair who could potentially influence the fate of their bills for years. Beyond that, a key Democratic ally is now facing what could potentially be an existential threat. Two Republican courts held that President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are not valid, and if these decisions are upheld it will completely disable the NLRB’s ability to function. Without the NLRB, the backbone of federal labor law will become completely unenforceable — and with it, the right to organize could effectively cease to exist so long as Senate Republicans block new appointments to the Board. Unless, of course, Senate Democrats take away the ability to block confirmations via a filibuster.

In an interview with a public radio station in Nevada Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) indicated that the weak-tea filibuster reforms Senate Republicans agreed to last January may not be the last round of reforms during the current Congress — at least if Senate Republicans continue to filibuster judges without good reason or consequence. During the interview, Reid threatened to invoke a process championed by Senate Republicans in 2005 in order to change the Senate’s broken rules and end conservative roadblocks against judicial confirmations:

“All within the sound of my voice, including my Democratic senators and the Republican senators who I serve with, should understand that we as a body have the power on any given day to change the rules with a simple majority, and I will do that if necessary,” Reid said on Nevada Public Radio.

Reid last year adopted the position that rules could be changed using a simple majority — instead of a filibuster-proof majority — if done on the first day of the legislative session. But these recent comments appear to signal that he believes he has an even broader ability to reshape the chamber’s rules. . . . “I’m a very patient man. Last Congress and this Congress, we had the opportunity to make some big changes. We made changes, but the time will tell whether they’re big enough. I’m going to wait and build a case,” Reid said. “If the Republicans in the Senate don’t start approving some judges and don’t start helping get some of these nominations done, then we’re going to have to take more action.”

It is certainly good news that Reid appears willing to push more serious filibuster reforms through the Senate, but the ultimate test is whether he and 50 of his Senate colleagues have the resolve to actually pull the trigger on rules changes if Senate Republicans continue to erect barriers to judicial confirmation.

The last time this drama played out, with Democrats and Republicans each playing the opposite role, President Bush nominated several unusually ideological judges to federal appeals courts. These included Priscillia Owen, who took thousands of dollars worth of campaign contributions from Enron when she sat on the Texas Supreme Court, and then wrote an opinion reducing Enron’s taxes by $15 million. And Janice Rogers Brown, who compared liberalism to “slavery” and court decisions upholding the New Deal to a “socialist revolution” before joining the federal bench, and who wrote an opinion suggesting that all labor, business or Wall Street regulation is constitutionally suspect last year.

Nevertheless, few people doubted in 2005 that Senate Republicans were prepared to nuke the filibuster in order to confirm Bush’s slate of nominees, and seven Democratic senators eventually capitulated almost entirely to Republican demands and allowed both Owen and Brown to be confirmed in order to preserve the filibuster. In light of the Senate GOP’s effective use of that filibuster to block much of President Obama’s agenda and nominees, this capitulation now looks even more ill-considered in hindsight than it did at the time it occurred.

President Obama has never nominated anyone as far to the left as Judge Brown is to the right — indeed, it is not clear that anyone other than an avowed communist would fit that bill. Nevertheless, there is a lesson in the 2005 fight that made Brown a federal judge that Reid should take to heart: the best chance of convincing enough Senate Republicans to break with their party and stop filibustering Obama’s judicial nominees is for Reid to first convince them that he will pull the trigger on major rules reform unless they stop hindering the confirmation process.

And if Senate Republicans try to call Reid’s bluff by filibustering another nominee, Reid must show that he wasn’t bluffing.

Tuesday night, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) declared that an assault weapons ban would not be in the gun law reform package he was planning to bring to the floor for a cloture vote, a move expected by all sides of the debate. But in an surprising twist, Reid also suggested that a provision requiring gun purchasers to undergo background checks could also be excluded from the comprehensive package.

Though Reid cited a recent breakdown in bipartisan negotiations over the issue of whether dealers should retain records of background checks, failing to pass the measure would deal a major blow to gun violence prevention efforts. Advocating for universal background checks isn’t just an obvious political winner — it’s absolutely critical to keeping guns out criminal hands and, most importantly, preventing innocent people from dying from gunfire:

1. Universal background checks deter criminals from purchasing guns. This isn’t really a contestable point. 80 percent of crime guns are purchased through “private” sales, which means from unlicensed dealers at gun shows or other people currently exempted from having to run background checks under federal law. Forcing all sellers to run background checks both deters criminals from buying guns (if they fail the check they can be prosecuted) and prevents a check on sellers that might be inclined to sell to shady characters if they didn’t know they were committing a federal crime. Unsurprisingly, the best available research suggests that “states which do not regulate private gun sales, adopt permit-to-purchase licensing systems, or have gun owner accountability measures, like mandatory reporting of gun thefts, export significantly more guns used by criminals to other states that have constrained the supply of guns for criminals by adopting strict gun sales regulations.” That’s why the law needs to be federal — states with lax background checks are de facto shipping crime guns around the country.

2. They save lives. Johns Hopkins gun expert Daniel Webster recently studied what happened when Missouri repealed its “purchase-to-permit” law, which was essentially a universal background check requirement. Turns out that, while regional and national gun homicides were declining, Missouri’s spiked by 25 percent. If the federal law worked in reverse, reducing gun homicides by 25 percent would have saved 2,750 lives per year.

3. They’re virtually cost free. Background checks are very cheap, very quick, and easily accessible to virtually all Americans. So background checks wouldn’t really prevent law-abiding Americans from purchasing guns, but would significantly limit criminal access to firearms.

4. Americans are united around them. Poll after poll has confirmed that somewhere around 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks. The figure is basically identical among gun owners (87 percent) and slightly lower, but still overwhelmingly high, among NRA members (74 percent).

Reid, who has a relatively high NRA rating (for a Democrat), has expressed skepticism about some parts of President Obama’s comprehensive gun violence prevention package. Still, lawmakers will ultimately have to vote on background checks — as an amendment or part of a comprehensive plan — and those who oppose the measure, they’ll have to justify their position to the 90 percent of Americans who support it.