HUGH HEWITT: Should Republicans Kill The Filibuster?

To invoke, or not to invoke, the “Reid Rule?” That is the singe most important question facing Senate Republicans.

Simply put, if destroying what is left of the Senate’s tradition of the filibuster would save the country from terrible crises and hardship, almost every senator of both parties would vote to abolish it.

Indeed, all but one of the currently serving Senate Democrats who also served in 2013 voted with their leader to break the filibuster rule by simple majority, thus creating “the Reid Rule” that the rules of the Senate can be modified by a simple majority of the senators present. (West Virginia’s Joe Manchin voted against breaking the filibuster then, along with Carl Levin and Mark Pryor — the former retired, the latter was defeated in November.)

It was the Republicans who first threatened to use the “nuclear option” in the summer of 2005, an action avoided by the compromise cobbled together by the “Gang of 14.” Had the GOP not fallen for the Democrats’ promise of comity, the “Reid Rule” would have been born as the “Frist Rule,” named instead for the majority leader of the Senate in ’05, Bill Frist.

But Frist didn’t pull the trigger and fracture the filibuster. Reid did. Thus Reid will live on in infamy, at least in the eyes of Senate traditionalists.

The filibuster is not part of the Constitution, however, and all that ever preserved it was a bipartisan sense of the necessity of maintaining a tradition that honored the role of the minority in a long-enduring Republic. Now with the president embarked on an unconstitutional abdication of his oath to faithfully execute the laws, along with his adventures with Cuba and Iran that have many in his own party alarmed, the question is squarely presented: Does the near term of the Republic’s future outweigh the long term interests of the Senate?

I seem to remember a lot of columns on how unAmerican the filibuster was just a year or two ago. . . .