To add to Steven Duffield’s excellent observations about the Senate’s adoption yesterday of a rule capping post-cloture debate on many nominations to two hours:

When then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid abolished the filibuster for lower-court nominations in November 2013, he was also restoring Senate norms. As I wrote at the time, “Abolition of the judicial filibuster essentially restores the operational status quo that existed before Senate Democrats launched their unprecedented filibuster campaign in 2003.”

I welcomed the abolition of the judicial filibuster (even as I found it “galling that Senate Democrats can dish it out but can’t take it”). Among other things, I explained why I believed that the judicial filibuster was much more valuable to Senate Democrats opposing a Republican president’s nominees than it was to Senate Republicans opposing a Democratic president’s nominees. Further:

The only real prospect for improvement in the courts requires a good Republican president, and the most promising prospect involves a good Republican president and a Senate Republican majority. If this most promising prospect occurs, the unavailability of the filibuster should help Republicans make the best of it—including for Supreme Court nominations. (Although the rule change purports not to apply to Supreme Court nominations, the precedent that has been established clearly does.)

I continue to find it baffling that, after Republicans won control of the Senate in November 2014, a small cadre of current and former Senate Republican staffers pressed for Republicans to restore the judicial filibuster. As I explained in opposing that effort, their claim to be standing up for the grand traditions of the Senate ignored the simple fact that the longstanding tradition of the Senate, which prevailed throughout American history until Democrats flouted it beginning in 2003, is that the partisan filibuster of judicial nominees is an unacceptable tool of obstruction. Further, their argument that reinstating the judicial filibuster was necessary or useful to help preserve the legislative filibuster ignored that the long-settled tradition of the Senate was to treat debate over nominations and legislation very differently. (See my article “Don’t Bring Back the Judicial Filibuster” for more detail on the preceding points.) Ironically, it was the proponents of reinstating the judicial filibuster who presented a far greater long-term threat to the legislative filibuster, as they wrongly maintained that some abstract principle, completely disconnected from Senate practice and history, requires that the legislative filibuster and the judicial filibuster stand or fall together.

Had the judicial filibuster been restored, what most conservatives regard as President Trump’s greatest overall success—his appointments of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and of many outstanding appellate judges—would never have happened. (If someone wants to contend that Gorsuch might have been confirmed anyway, go ahead. I doubt it. But Kavanaugh certainly wouldn’t have been, and most of the outstanding appellate judges appointed by Trump would never even have made themselves candidates.)

Conservatives from this same cadre argued against the adoption of the two-hour rule for post-cloture debate on the same grounds they argued for restoration of the judicial filibuster. If they ever highlighted what would have happened if their previous advice had been followed, I missed it. Further, as Duffield points out, they ignore that the rule restores the longstanding Senate norm.