Putting their knives away

FACED with “a partisan knife fight”, explained Claire McCaskill, a Democratic senator from Missouri, the Senate balked. In the name of efficiency several of her colleagues had suggested doing away with or watering down the filibuster, which allows any senator to block almost any measure, unless overruled by at least 60 of the chamber's 100 members. Republicans saw efficiency as code for unfettered rule by the slender Democratic majority of 53. Worse, the change was to be adopted by a suspect procedural manoeuvre. In the end, the proposed reform (like so many bills threatened with a filibuster) was replaced with something much more innocuous.

Just as the row about filibuster reform was about to come to a head, on January 27th, the majority and minority leaders unveiled an alternative package of tweaks to Senate procedures and powers that both had agreed on. Senators will no longer be able to prevent consideration of bills or nominations to government jobs anonymously—a practice known as “secret holds”. They will also surrender the power to vet presidential appointments to some 400 of the 1,200 posts currently subject to their nod. One particularly vexatious stalling tactic, to insist that all amendments be read aloud on the Senate floor, will be banned provided the amendments in question have been publicly available for three days. Both sides disavowed the notion of changing the Senate's rules using the “nuclear option” advocated by the filibuster's foes: by a simple majority vote at the beginning of a new Congress, rather than the 67-vote threshold observed during normal business. The Democrats also promised to allow the Republicans more opportunity to propose amendments.

All of this, says a staffer for Tom Udall, one of the filibuster's fiercest critics, amounts to the biggest shake-up of the Senate's rules since the 1970s. None of it would have come about, she adds, had Mr Udall and others not been clamouring for more dramatic changes.

But there is still a long way to go. The banning of secret holds, after all, does nothing to prevent the public variety. Last year the unabashed Mary Landrieu, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, kept the appointment of a new budget director on ice for months in protest at the administration's moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Richard Shelby, a Republican, briefly put almost all pending nominations on hold in pursuit of several pet projects for his state, Alabama.

The reduction in jobs requiring Senate approval, meanwhile, should decongest the chamber's schedule a bit. But the junior positions in question do not normally cause much controversy, nor does leaving them vacant do much damage. By contrast, nominations of judges, a perpetual source of discord and a worrying drag on the courts, are not part of the deal.

Nor have more radical Democrats given up hope of reforming the filibuster. Their proposals earned over 40 votes, and they have vowed to continue canvassing. Tom Harkin of Iowa, who has agitated against the filibuster since 1995, is now talking about seeking judicial review—in one of those understaffed courts, presumably.