Here’s the opening paragraph of my essay now up on NRO:

In Tuesday’s elections, Republicans won control of the Senate and expanded their majority in the House. In the coming weeks and months, Republicans in Congress must focus on developing and pursuing a winning agenda over the next two years — an agenda that will help elect a Republican president in November 2016 and provide that president with a governing majority in Congress. But a small cadre of current and former Senate staffers is instead pressing Republican senators on what strikes me as a profoundly foolish and destructive diversion: reinstating the filibuster — more precisely, the 60-vote cloture threshold — for lower-court (and executive-branch) nominees.

If Republicans had the power to entrench the judicial filibuster—to make its restoration durable—then I could understand (even as I still would disagree with) the effort to reinstate it. But they don’t. When Democrats regain control of the Senate, they will abolish it as soon as it suits them (i.e., as soon as there is a Democratic president). So any Republicans who seek to restore the filibuster are instead working to adopt an asymmetry

in which Senate Democrats, when they’re in the majority, abolish the judicial filibuster and in which Senate Republicans, when they’re in the majority, reimpose it. When Democrats control the Senate, liberal nominees would need only a simple majority to get confirmed, but when Republicans control the Senate, conservative nominees would have to pass the much higher threshold of 60 votes.