Nuclear option may mean war

The Senate Democrats have gone and done it.

After years of threats from both sides, the Democrats went ahead and launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike against years of tradition and voted to prevent filibusters against presidential appointments other than Supreme Court nominees.

While we sympathize with the sentiments on both sides that partisanship has made Congress the most dysfunctional institution in America, it is nonetheless hard to see how this blatantly partisan maneuver is going to do anything but aggravate tensions in the Capitol building.

Perhaps the three Democrats who crossed party lines to vote against the “nuclear option” had the same idea. Unfortunately, none of the three were from Montana. Sens. Baucus and Tester voted with their party to claim the right of the majority to muscle through presidential appointments without having to cater to minority fears and concerns.

Let’s be plain — this is not a partisan issue. The Senate’s practice of halting debate on presidential nominations got underway in earnest in 2001 when President George W. Bush tried to make several controversial appointments in the wake of his disputed election the year before. Whether Democrats were playing politics or not is irrelevant. The point is that their ability to hold up appointments forced President Bush to seek future nominees from the middle ground rather than what would be called the radical right. For the past five years President Obama has been forced to do the same thing, being stymied by the Republicans from appointing anyone from what would be called the radical left.

While no doubt annoying to the presidents, who in general tend to see their power as absolute, it is hard to see how the country was ill-served by a Senate policy that protected us from judges and other appointees who were seen as outside the mainstream.

Perhaps if the new rule were applied only to Cabinet appointments, it would have wider support. You can easily make the case that the president should have wide latitude to appoint deputies to carry out the policies he was elected to pursue, and those positions all terminate with the election of a new president. But federal judicial appointments carry with them a lifetime tenure, and the work of judges has long-lasting impact even past their lifetimes thanks to the judicial application of precedent.

Perhaps that is why Democrats decided to throw caution to the winds last month and jettison a policy that had been in place for decades. The elections of 2014 could easily shift the balance of power in the Senate, thus endangering President Obama’s ability to stack the courts with left-leaning jurists.

It is expected that for the next year, at least, the president will take full advantage of this new policy to appoint as many judges as he can. We must hope that he uses discretion in making those appointments because, we repeat, federal judicial appointments carry with them a lifetime tenure. For those of us who don’t wish to see a radicalization of the American judiciary, that alone is reason enough why the Democratic decision to end such filibusters is a bad idea.

Another reason is that conservatives will no doubt regain a Senate majority at some juncture, and then this short-sighted policy change will appear incredibly unappetizing to the new Democratic minority. They will, however, have no one to blame but themselves.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.