WASHINGTON, DC — Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) admitted that a bloc of mostly junior senators who supported eliminating or significantly reforming the filibuster were “right” and “the rest of us were wrong,” when the Senate failed to pass filibuster reform last year. In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) predicted that rules reform will happen in the wake of Reid’s admission:

QUESTION: Majority Leader Reid just came out in favor of filibuster reform after he had, um, not been so keen to it the last time we had an opportunity. I know that that’s an area where you’ve done a little bit of work. Do you think that [filibuster reform] is likely to happen when we get the window?

WHITEHOUSE: Yep, I do. . . . I think that the major targets will be the double filibuster, filibustering both the motion to proceed to the bill and then the bill itself. That would be one target. I think the other major target of filibuster reform will be changing the rules of the filibuster so that the filibustering minority actually has to spend time on the floor defending its filibuster, rather than, right now, it’s the majority trying to get to 60 that has to be ready to fend off quorum calls and have all the Senators ready — and only one senator needs to be around from the minority side to defend the filibuster.

Watch it:

The “window” my question refers to is a brief, constitutionally required period every two years shortly after newly-elected senators are sworn in. During this short window, the Senate can alter the filibuster rules or even eliminate the filibuster altogether with just 51 votes. Normally, 67 votes are required to change the Senate’s rules.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, Senate Democrats may not have a choice when the next window opens next January, assuming that Democrats maintain control of the Senate and the White House. Longtime Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) was recently defeated in the GOP Senate primary by a candidate who objected to Lugar’s votes for Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. In light of this precedent, it is likely that the few Senate Republicans who were unwilling to obstruct these two nominees will see the Tea Party in their rear view mirror during the next confirmation fight, and will fear being Lugared. If Senate Democrats do not take their next opportunity to pass filibuster reform, the consequence could be a complete inability to fill Supreme Court vacancies.

In 2020, someone will be elected president, and they will likely need to appoint a Supreme Court justice during their time in the White House. Senate Republicans have wielded every power at their disposal, however, to ensure that that this future president will have no experienced federal judges to nominate if they are a Democrat. When President Obama nominated Goodwin Liu, a young, brilliant legal scholar and former Supreme Court law clerk to a seat on the Ninth Circuit, the Republican caucus filibustered Liu until he was forced to withdraw his nomination (Liu is now a justice on the California Supreme Court). When Obama nominated Caitlin Halligan, another relatively young, brilliant attorney and former Supreme Court law clerk, she suffered a similar fate.

The cases against these two nominees were flimsy at best, even from a conservative perspective. Liu’s enjoyed the support of conservative icons like Clinton-inquistor Ken Starr and torture advocate John Yoo. Senators opposing his nomination offered little more than misrepresentation of his scholarship or hyperbolic claims that he wanted to turn America into “communist-run China.” The case against Halligan was even weaker, and largely boiled down to the fact that she once represented a client — the State of New York — that disagreed with the NRA.

On Monday, the Senate will try to break yet another filibuster — this time on Ninth Circuit nominee Paul Watford. And, once again, it’s tough to imagine a good reason to support this filibuster. Watford is a leading young attorney and a former Supreme Court clerk. He has a small army of conservative supporters, including nearly every single person who clerked for a Supreme Court justice at the time Watford worked on the Court. And his opponents have barely even managed to articulate a reason to oppose him. The best they’ve come up with is that, in a legal career that stretches twenty years, he represented two clients that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) doesn’t like.

Unfortunately for Watford, however, he is guilty of being the kind of exceptionally talented attorney who could be on the Supreme Court some day. If past is prologue, that will be reason enough for conservatives to filibuster him.

Yesterday, Nebraska GOP primary voters nominated dark horse candidate and state Sen. Deb Fischer as their candidate for an open U.S. Senate race this November. In choosing Fischer, the Nebraska GOP aligns itself with a candidate who recently called for a very high stakes game of chicken — flirting with economic catastrophe in order to force Congress to permanently enshrine Tea Party fiscal policy into the Constitution.

During last year’s debt ceiling crisis, which Speaker John Boehner has threatened to repeat next year, House and Senate Republicans threatened to force the United States to default on its debt — an outcome that would have caused “a bigger GDP drop than that experienced during the Great Recession of 2008″ — unless President Obama agreed to an increasingly escalating series of demands for austerity. Even after this campaign of extortion forced the White House to make significant concessions, Fischer indicated that she would have simply let the economy blow up because Congress didn’t also agree to a constitutional amendment:

Nebraska’s 2012 Republican Senate candidates turned thumbs down Monday on the compromise debt reduction plan agreed to by the White House and congressional leaders.

“I would vote no on this specific bill because Congress needs to pass a balanced budget (constitutional) amendment first,” said state Sen. Deb Fischer of Valentine.

It’s not clear which version of the balanced budget amendment Fischer is referring to here, but even the mildest forms of such an amendment are terrible ideas because they prevent the United States from responding to economic downturns or unexpected disasters, while simultaneously turning control of the nation’s budget over to unelected judges who are ill-equipped to handle it.

Moreover, at the time that Fischer endorsed blowing up the economy unless Congress votes to change the Constitution, the leading Republican proposal for such an amendment imposed such draconian spending cuts that it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” The lead sponsor of this plan to trigger a new Great Depression, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), also called for forcing a debt default unless Congress gives him everything he wants.

In other words, while little is known about the obscure state lawmaker who wants to join the United States Senate, her willingness to play chicken with America’s prosperity strongly suggests that she would line up with the most hardline members of the Republican caucus.

Four Members of Congress, Reps. John Lewis, (D-GA), Michael Michaud, (D-ME), Hank Johnson, (D-GA), and Keith Ellison, (D-MN) filed a lawsuit yesterday claiming that the filibuster is unconstitutional and must be blocked by federal courts. According to their complaint, the Constitution specifically lists only a handful of instances where a supermajority is required for Congress to act, and this list precludes such a requirement from being applied in other cases:

In the end, the Constitution proscribed six instances in which Congress would require more than a majority vote: impeaching the president, expelling members, overriding a presidential veto of a bill or order, ratifying treaties and amending the Constitution. . . . “The Framers were aware of the established rule of construction, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, and that by adopting these six exceptions to the principle of majority rule, they were excluding other exceptions.” By contrast, in the Bill of Rights, the Founders were careful to state that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

As a textual matter, this is a strong constitutional argument. Yet it is likely not to get off the ground because of something known as the “political question doctrine.” As the Supreme Court explained in Baker v. Carr, federal courts generally should avoid deciding questions where there is a “textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department” — meaning that the Constitution’s text suggests that an issue should be decided by the executive or legislative branch and not by the judiciary. Because the Constitution provides that “[e]ach House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings,” the courts are likely — although not entirely certain — to dismiss this case because the Constitution reserves questions of Senate procedure to the Senate itself.

In other words, this lawsuit is likely to highlight why it is so important for the Senate itself to reform the filibuster to prevent the minority from shutting down America’s ability to effectively govern itself. And the Senate will have an opportunity to do so in about seven months. Once every two years, when the newly elected senators are sworn in, a brief window opens up when the Senate can reform its rules with only 51 votes.

In the wake of this week’s deal where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed to stop obstructing 14 of President Obama’s judicial nominees and allow them to be confirmed by early May, Al Kamen runs the numbers on how President Obama’s confirmation rate compares to the rate of confirmations under Presidents Bush and Clinton:

After the Senate acts on the 14 agreed-upon judges, there are eight more already teed up for a full Senate vote. An additional eight are in the Senate Judiciary Committee pipeline. And that panel’s chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), says he’ll begin work on 11 more judges in the next few weeks.

That’s a total of 41 potentially approved judges.

If the Senate does, in fact, approve them all, Obama’s number of confirmed judges will stand at 172.

To put that in perspective, by the end of May in their respective first terms, George W. Bush had 175 judges approved, and Bill Clinton had 183.

In other words, even if the Senate were to confirm every single one of Obama’s pending nominees before the end of May — a tall order in the hyper-obstructionist era of Mitch McConnell — the president would still lag three judges behind his immediate predecessor. But, of course, there is no deal currently in place to confirm more than 14 of these nominees, which means the Obama Administration is now on track to be 30 judges behind President Bush absent additional confirmations.

In an exchange that seems designed to prove why fewer Americans approve of Congress than approve of communism or the BP oil spill, Senate Leaders Harry Reid (D-NV) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) engaged in a long debate this morning over why Reid is currently trying to break seventeen filibusters of President Obama’s judicial nominees. The exchange culminated with McConnell admitting that, even though all these judges will be confirmed eventually, he is blocking them now because he is upset that Reid’s making him look bad:

REID: I’ve got a great idea. My friend the Republican Leader said these judges are all going to get approved anyway, so I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to this IPO bill immediately after finishing the highway bill, with the agreement that we’ll dispose of these judges immediately after that. . . .

McCONNELL: It is highly unlikely any of these district judges are not going to be confirmed. We’ve done a number of them this year. We’ve done seven this year. District judges are almost never defeated. This is just a very transparent attempt to try to slam dunk the minority and make them look like they are obstructing things they aren’t obstructing. We object to that. We don’t think that meets the standard of civility that should be expected in the Senate. And, so, any effort to make the minority look bad or attempt to slam dunk them that is sort of manufactured as this is is gonna, of course, be greeted with resistance.

Watch it:

Let’s explain what’s going on here. Both Reid and McConnell agree that there is nothing objectionable about these judges — in McConnell’s words, “it is highly unlikely any of these district judges are not going to be confirmed.” Additionally, both men agree that the Senate should vote on the “IPO bill” that Reid refers to, a bill dealing with investments in small businesses that recently passed the House. Initially, Reid wanted to vote on the seventeen judges awaiting confirmation before moving on to the IPO bill, but he even concedes this point — saying that he is willing to “go to this IPO bill” first as McConnell prefers.

And then McConnell says this deal is unacceptable because Reid “ma[de] the minority look bad.”

If this is truly McConnell’s reason for blocking these judges, then he just made an absolutely shocking admission. Thanks to excessive judicial vacancies, America’s courts are increasingly unable to function. In some courts, judges are so overburdened they have to rush major felony cases through as if they involved minor traffic violations. In one court, felony caseloads nearly doubled in just two years. Every court that is unable to handle its caseload means wrongly fired workers waiting months or years for justice and businesses that must delay making new hires until they are sure they won’t be hit with an unwarranted legal judgment. And yet McConnell says he is willing to punish all of these workers and businesses because he is upset that Reid has made him look bad. America can ill afford this kind of tantrum.

Earlier this year, Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) announced that he would oppose each of President Obama’s nominees in retaliation for the fact that Lee believed the president’s recent recess appointments to be unconstitutional. Lee also believes that national child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, and income assistance for the poor are unconstitutional.

Regrettably, Lee’s fellow Tea Partier Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has now decided to follow Lee’s lead:

DeMint, who voted last fall for two Obama judicial choices from South Carolina, said he’s now rejecting all of the president’s nominees to protest his winter recess appointments of four controversial nominees to avoid GOP opposition.

“President Obama has shown a complete disdain for the people’s elected representatives and our duty to advise and consent on nominations,” DeMint told McClatchy.

“Unless he revokes his unprecedented recess appointments that defied the constitutional role of Congress, I don’t intend to support any of his judicial nominees this year,” DeMint said.

Needless to say, Lee and DeMint are wrong about the constitutionality of the president’s recess appointments. They and many of their fellow congressional Republicans have argued that the Senate can defeat the president’s recess appointments power by having a single senator hit the Senate’s gavel twice every three days (this is not an exaggeration). Yet, as two of President George W. Bush’s top constitutional advisors explained in 2010, the question of whether the president can make recess appointments does not turn on whether the Senate engages in some empty formality, rather, “the question ‘is whether in a practical sense the Senate is in session so that its advice and consent can be obtained.’”

Because the Senate was out of town and conducting no business when the president named his recent recess appointments, there is no good reason to doubt their constitutionality.