Paul Kane of the Washington Post published a report this week suggesting how much attitudes and rhetoric about the filibuster and “obstruction” have changed since Republicans took control of the Senate in January. Things have shifted some, but on at least one point, however, readers may be misled, or Kane overstates his case. He writes:

Two days after [Senate majority leader] McConnell declared the Senate DHS bill “stuck” because of Democratic “obstruction,” House Republicans called on their Senate counterparts to . . . do away with the filibuster so the majority can move its legislation by a simple majority vote, greatly reducing the ability of the minority party to block legislation.
McConnell has brushed aside those requests, sticking to his pledge to change the rules of the Senate only if a two-thirds majority agrees. . . .
Regardless of the outcome, the GOP calls for change were a swift and dramatic reversal. Republicans had spent all of 2014 on the campaign trail using words such as “dictator” to describe Reid and his leadership. In November 2013, Reid used the “nuclear option” to change the rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold on all presidential nominations except for the Supreme Court, inciting a Republican outcry of injustice that appears to have lasted only through Election Day 2014.
Now, conservative outlets that lambasted Reid 18 months ago, such as the National Review, are publishing columns agitating for McConnell to go much further and completely eliminate the filibuster.

You might get the impression from this that conservatives now favor abolition of the filibuster. I don’t think that’s quite true, but in any case the evidence for it is lazily gathered. Besides noting demands from some House Republicans, Kane notes that NR published a piece arguing for getting rid of the filibuster, presumably to suggest conservative media has shifted. But that was Charles Krauthammer’s syndicated column, which we run every week. (It’s syndicated by . . . the Washington Post Writers Group.) Krauthammer’s view – shared by, e.g., Hugh Hewitt — might indicate some shift in conservative thinking, but says nothing about National Review’s. In fact, NR published a piece a few days after the Krauthammer column by a regular contributor (Fred Bauer) taking the other side of the argument — and NR’s editors explicitly rejected the idea of ending the legislative filibuster for the sake of the DHS fight. There’s no need or reason to suggest NR’s corporate sympathies lay elsewhere.