My Confirmation Tales post from yesterday—an expanded version of my early Wednesday morning post here at Bench Memos—includes a big thanks to the late Harry Reid:

I say “Thank you, Harry Reid!” because (as we shall discuss in detail in future posts) it was Democratic majority leader Harry Reid’s decision in November 2013 to abolish the filibuster—the 60-vote threshold for cloture—for lower-court nominees that led, as Reid himself anticipated and invited, to the abolition of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017. Without that abolition, it is doubtful that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett would ever have been nominated, much less confirmed. And there is plenty of reason to think that the filibuster would still be available as a tool of minority senators to block judicial appointments.
As I wrote back in November 2013:
“I don’t see how Reid can abolish the filibuster vis-à-vis pending judicial nominees without setting a clear precedent that would enable a future Senate majority, in the very midst of a confirmation battle over a Supreme Court nominee, to abolish the filibuster with respect to that nominee….
“It would be funny indeed if folks on the Left who evidently rue Senate Democrats’ opportunistic decision in 2003 to inaugurate the filibuster as a weapon against judicial nominees were now to support an opportunistic rule change that would lay the foundation for making it much easier for a Republican president to appoint anti-Roe Supreme Court nominees.”
It is even more remarkable that Reid’s strategic error now promises to maintain a strong conservative majority on the Supreme Court for many years to come.

I have also corrected an error that I made in both posts: I badly understated the number of Trump’s appellate appointees who are in the right age range to be considered for a Supreme Court appointment. There are more than 30. (I mistakenly drew “some 15 or 20” from a list I had compiled of candidates that I thought could get serious consideration.)

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