Changing Senate Rules for Policy Gain Is No Big Deal

Over the last few days, House conservatives have started asking Senate Republicans to change the Senate rules to weaken the filibuster so the Senate could more easily pass the Department of Homeland Security funding bill with immigration restrictions attached. Even though that would let the bill advance through the Senate, President Obama would almost certainly veto it. I imagine Congressional Republicans are fine with that, because it makes the issue more prominent in a way they think they can use against Democrats.

In any case, Senate Republicans are, for the most part, hostile to the idea. Some talk about tradition, and some just don’t think it’s worthwhile to change the rules for a relatively small bill. It’s the second argument that’s the stronger case against changing the rules here — changing the rules to achieve policy goals has been done dozens of times over the course of American history, so it wouldn’t be an unheard-of development. Exciting, yes; unheard of, no. That said, Senate Republicans should — and it seems like they are — strategically weigh whether the policy payoff is worth what they see as a big change to the rules.

I don’t think it’s a good trade-off. Republicans aren’t trying to put an arch-conservative on the Court, they aren’t trying to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, and they don’t really have a large policy goal at stake here. They just want to hit the President with something. At the heart of it, this is a spending bill with a rider to defund the President’s executive action — a proposal that may not even do anything.

So while changing the rules for policy goals is a historically well-documented process, curbing the filibuster over such a short-term goal doesn’t seem like a worthwhile trade to me.