Via Andrew Sullivan and Tapped, here’s Norm Ornstein (PhD in political science) with the best explanation I’ve seen of what’s wrong with the nuclear option from a parliamentary rules standpoint (see also Josh Marshall). I don’t buy all the silly arguments about the end of dissent that I’ve been mocking for weeks. But the way that Republicans are going to break the Senate’s rules in order to change the rules — which I hadn’t fully understood before — is deeply troubling:

Let us put aside for now the puerile arguments over whether judicial filibusters are unprecedented: They clearly, flatly, are not. Instead, let’s look at the means used to achieve the goal of altering Senate procedures to block filibusters on judicial nominations.

Without getting into the parliamentary minutiae–the options are dizzying, including whether points of order are “nested”–one reality is clear. To get to a point where the Senate decides by majority that judicial filibusters are dilatory and/or unconstitutional, the Senate will have to do something it has never done before.

Richard Beth of the Congressional Research Service, in a detailed report on the options for changing Senate procedures, refers to it with typical understatement as ‘an extraordinary proceeding at variance with established procedure.’”

To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation–debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say–regardless of the view held since the Senate’s beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents–they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority.

There have been times in the past when Senate leaders and presidents have been frustrated by inaction in the Senate and have contemplated action like this. Each time, the leaders and presidents drew back from the precipice. They knew that the short-term gain of breaking minority obstruction would come at the price of enormous long-term damage–turning a deliberative process into something akin to government by the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland.”

…By invoking their self-described nuclear option without changing the rules, a Senate majority will effectively erase them. A new precedent will be in order–one making it easy and tempting to erase future filibusters on executive nominations and bills. Make no mistake about that.

The precedent set–a majority ignoring its own rules to override longstanding practice in one area–would almost inexorably make the Senate a mirror image of the House, moving the American system several steps closer to a plebiscitary model of government, and the Senate closer to the unfortunate House model of a cesspool of partisan rancor.

In this sense, the way that Republicans are threatening to cut off debate on judicial filibusters threatens to fundamentally alter the nature of the Senate. Regardless of the merits of judicial filibusters or a more general shift toward House-style rules, the larger point is that a change of this magnitude should not be made on a party-line vote than violates the Senate’s own procedures.