Written by Walter Hecht   

The filibuster is still alive and well in the US Senate. The nuclear option only eliminated the filibuster of presidential nominees requiring Senate confirmation.

In 1937, FDR tried to increase the size of the US Supreme Court from 9 to 15 members. He was accused of trying to pack the Court so that it would stop declaring so much of the New Deal as unconstitutional. He was not able to pack the court. The nuclear option was necessary yesterday to stop the GOP attempt to unpack the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most important court in the US after the Supreme Court.

This is what the Republicans were trying to accomplish. Let me use the Supreme Court as an example to make my illustration more easily understandable. The Supreme Court consists of 9 members, 5 conservatives and 4 members of a more liberal persuasion. The GOP position recently has been that a retiring conservative justice must be replaced by another conservative, while a retiring liberal justice need not be replaced, thus reducing the size of the Court. Over time, the Supreme Court would be reduced from 9 members to only 5, all conservative. That's what I mean by unpacking the Court, the reverse of what FDR tried and failed to accomplish.

That is what the Republicans have been trying to do with the nation's second most important court, a court whose decisions are not widely reported in the media, but whose decisions affect all Americans as much or more than the decisions of the Supreme Court. This is what the nuclear option is all about. Don't be mislead by the GOP noise machine.