Web Video: Senate Democrats invoke the nuclear option in 2013

GWEN IFILL: Are we seeing the end of the filibuster or the beginning of the end?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: (From tape.) Today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal. It’s not what our founders envisioned.

MS. IFILL: Democrats play a little hardball.

SENATOR HARRY REID (D-NV) [Senate Majority Leader]: (From tape.) It’s time to change. It’s time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete.

MS. IFILL: Blowing up Senate rules to get the president’s nominees confirmed.

SENATOR LAMAR ALEXANDER (R-TN): (From tape.) It’s really not about the filibuster. It’s another raw exercise of political power to permit the majority to do anything it wants, whenever it wants to do it.

MS. IFILL: A breakthrough or a breakdown?

MS. IFILL: Good evening. It’s quiet in Washington tonight, but there are echoes here from a tumultuous week. We begin in the Senate, where the biggest debate was about finding a way to end debate.

SEN. REID: (From tape.) The American people believe Congress is broken. The American people believe the Senate is broken. And I believe the American people are right.

MS. IFILL: Senate Democrats infuriated the Republican minority by pulling the pin on a long-threatened grenade – changing the rules that require a 60-vote majority to confirm presidential nominees.

SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY) [Senate Minority Leader]: (From tape.) They believe that one set of rules should apply to them – to them and another set to everybody else. He may as just as well have said, if you like the rules of the Senate, you can keep them. If you like the rules of the Senate, you can keep them.

MS. IFILL: That was very lively from Mitch McConnell.

SUSAN DAVIS: That was a big laugh line in the Senate this week.

MS. IFILL: How long was this in the works? It seems like it’s suddenly – after years of talking about the nuclear option, all of a sudden, there it was.

MS. DAVIS: I think if you were paying close attention to the Senate, there was a sense of inevitability to this. You kind of knew it was coming. The most recent – what sort of – the final straw in all this was a recent fight over D.C. Circuit Court nominations. This has been sort of in the works for weeks. Each one of these three qualified nominees were filibustered by Republicans. All the while, Harry Reid was warning them that if they keep doing this, he’s going to finally go nuclear.

If you’ve paid attention to the Senate longer, the filibuster has been contentious for most of modern history. The last time they changed the rules was in the 1970s. The threshold used to be 67 votes. Then they moved it to 60. Democrats today said that is still too high of a bar.

If you – supporters of changing it call it the constitutional option, saying that any president, which Democrats were quick to focus on this week – not just President Obama, all future presidents – now have a stronger prerogative to be able to fill the government with the people that they want to work for them. And that seems like a very basic thing to support.

On the downside, there is something called minority rights, which is sort of what makes the United States Senate the United States Senate, and which gives each senator sort of an equal amount of importance in the chamber. The idea that any of them can gum up the works is sort of what makes it a special place.

Now the Democrats have said, majority rule can change the rules of the Senate and that, in such a significant way changes the way this chamber is going to work.

MARTHA RADDATZ: So, Sue, what does it look forward – the Supreme Court, what does it mean for the Supreme Court nominees?

MS. DAVIS: Well, that’s one of the big questions. And part of the reason why they didn’t go nuclear, why they always walked up to the line and walked back was this idea that you could go too far. They drew the line, but what they did was it only changes executive nominations, people like cabinet officials and all judges but the Supreme Court.

But it’s the slippery-slope argument. And this is what Republicans warned this week. They said if you open this box, if you open this Pandora’s Box, you are changing the game by which any future majority can change those rules. Democrats have said they don’t intend to change the rules for Supreme Court nominees, but in two years and four years and six years? It is certainly a possibility at this point.

JAMES KITFIELD: When there’s been problems in the past, the thing that always make people step back was, well, you’re going to be minority sooner or later and then it’s going to work against you. And that kind of made – why this time did the Democrats say, we don’t care? We know we’re going to be in the minority and it’s going to come back and haunt us at some point, but right now we’re going to do it?

MS. DAVIS: What’s really interesting in the Senate right now – and John McCain and other Republicans, more senior Republicans, more senior Democrats – Carl Levin was a Democrat who voted against it – said most Democrats serving right now don’t know what life in the majority is or in the minority is like. Thirty-three of 55 Senate Democrats have only known the Senate in the majority.

Carl Levin voted against it this week and he said that very same thing is that you have to think of this as an institution and not just as your personal prerogative right now. To think that – and Republicans have been rather candid in saying, when we take over, and eventually we will take over, that we are going – we have every right. Well, you’ve set this; you’ve set the precedent that the majority can change the rules with just a majority vote. And Mitch McConnell said on the floor, it may happen sooner than you think.