Let's not get carried away here. The Constitution grants each chamber of Congress - House and Senate - to make their own rules. As such, the rules of each chamber are not "laws". They're just rules...guidelines on how business will be conducted within each respective chamber. Nothing more.
Don't like the way the rules are, vote and change them. Granted, this particular rule change was a party-line vote, but for folks to act as if Republicans have never threatened to do this themselves is just two-faced. If both sides were really serious about doing "the will of the People", this would not be an issue. But instead, they're only out to either puff up their party OR punish the other side for not getting their way.
I know the republicans threaten to do exactly what Reid did today back in 2005. But they didn't. So what better words to explain that back then than from one each Senator Obama and Senator Biden at the time.
SENATOR BARACK OBAMA (D-ILLINOIS): The American people sent us here to be their voice. They understand that those voices can at times become loud and argumentative, but they also hope that we can disagree without being disagreeable. […]
What they don't expect is for one party - be it Republican or Democrat - to change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet. […]
The American people want less partisanship in this town, but everyone in this chamber knows that the majority chooses to end the filibuster. If they choose to change the rules and put an end to Democratic debate, then the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse.
Now I understand that Republicans are getting a lot of pressure to do this from factions outside the chamber, but we need to rise above the "ends justify the means" mentality because we're here to answer to the people - all of the people - not just the ones that are wearing our particular party label. […]
If the right of free and open debate is taken away from the minority party, and the millions of Americans who asked us to be their voice, I fear that the already partisan atmosphere in Washington will be poisoned to the point where no one will be able to agree on anything. That doesn't serve anyone's best interests, and it certainly isn't what the patriots who founded this democracy had in mind. We owe the people who sent us here more than that - we owe them much more.
Speaking on the Senate floor in May of 2005, Biden said, "At its core, the filibuster is not about stopping a nominee or a bill, it's about compromise and moderation. The nuclear option extinguishes the power of independents and moderates in the Senate. That's it, they're done. Moderates are important if you need to get to 60 votes to satisfy cloture; they are much less so if you only need 50 votes. Let's set the historical record straight. Never has the Senate provided for a certainty that 51 votes could put someone on the bench or pass legislation."
When the Senate was considering President George W. Bush's nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the United States Supreme Court, Biden held out the prospect of a filibuster to block it. "If he really believes that reapportionment is a questionable decision … then clearly, clearly, you'll find a lot of people, including me, willing to do whatever they can to keep him off the court," Biden said, adding, "That would include a filibuster, if need be."
During his years in the Senate, Biden could be counted on to routinely join Democratic efforts to support filibusters of Republican programs--from the second President Bush's energy bill to the first President Bush's effort to cut the tax on capital gains in order to stimulate the U.S. economy and blunt the impact of the early-'90s recession. Now that he is vice president, and the entire Obama agenda is imperiled, he has changed his mind in an apparent deathbed conversion. It won't last.
