Senate Republicans are now irrelevant. Might as well stay home. The Senate was designed so the US would be different from a monarchy or dictatorship, so things would move slowly, some call it gridlock. It's a feature, not a bug-Rush Limbaugh

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11/21/13, "Harkin calls for more rule changes," The Hill

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11/22/13, "Republican Votes in the Senate are Now Irrelevant," Rush Limbaugh

"The nuclear option means that Republican votes in the Senate are irrelevant. This is strictly the Senate. There are 45 Republicans in the Senate and they may as well not ever show up for work anymore. It doesn't matter. The filibuster rule required 60 votes to pass anything, including a presidential nominee to a court or a cabinet post or even pieces of legislation. This is hundreds of years of Senate tradition and rules.

In the five years that Barack Obama has been president, he has nominated genuinely extreme people who are out of the American mainstream, to sit on courts, to be cabinet secretaries, to sit over at the EPA, you name it, really genuinely radical leftist extremes who are not part of the American mainstream. The Republicans have filibustered a number of these nominees in order to keep genuine radical leftists out. The Democrats are fit to be tied over this because their view is Obama won and he should be able to nominate whoever he wants. 

Now, folks, the simple fact is, when the majority, in any group of people, when the majority can change the rules at any time, then there aren't any rules. This is a point that I've been making repeatedly all week long. Senator who?  Carl Levin said that?...Carl Levin voted against it.  There are three Democrats who voted against it. He was one of them, 'cause he recognizes this is bad, and it is....

But it really is a fundamental discarding of hundreds of years of tradition, and for one reason only.  Barack Obama can't get what he wants democratically. There's no other reason for this.  Barack Obama cannot get his nominees. He can't pack the DC court of appeals. He wants three additional judges, and he wants to be able to appoint Democrats. It will be a permanent Democrat majority on that court. He's been denied here, he's been denied there. His labor secretary was denied. His EPA secretaries have been denied, and he's fit to be tied.  So he can't win by appointing people that appeal to a majority....

Now, this happens to both parties.  How many times have you heard Chuck Schumer characterize every Republican nominee as out of the mainstream?  Well, he's wrong when he says it.  What he means is they're not extreme liberals, and anybody who's not an extreme leftist is out of the mainstream in Chuck Schumer's world....So...they've gotten rid of the 60-vote requirement 'cause they're not getting their way. 

So the end result of it is that any Obama appointee or any piece of legislation now only needs 51 votes in the Senate. There is no filibuster permitted anymore. Well, the Democrats have...a total of 55 people voting the Democrat side. The Republicans have 45. And Democrats now only need 51 votes for everything...so the Republicans cannot stop a thing. The Republican senators may as well not show up. There's nothing they can do. I mean, they can participate in committee hearings and they can ask questions, and they can go through all this, but they can't stop anything.

The rule now is, the practical meaning of the rule is that there are no rules, and the Republicans' votes mean nothing....Once you start changing the rules as the majority -- the Founders were terrified of the tyranny of the majority. One of the reasons that the Senate was structured and founded the way it is, as opposed to the House, it was designed for gridlock.  It was designed to stop massive new laws being passed and voted on daily. It was designed to stop the growth of government.... 
 
My point is, it doesn't matter. The Republicans may as well not vote. Their votes mean nothing. The people that elected them have absolutely no representation in the Senate at all, other than their senator maybe getting to participate in hearings and ask questions of witnesses, you know, whoop-de-doo.  It just means that the Senate no longer does advice and consent. It's simply consent....It's not the House where all these judges have to be interviewed and pass muster and so forth, or cabinet appointees. It's the Senate."


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