Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last week took the extraordinary step—in response to Democrats' obstruction of President Trump's nominees—of using the “nuclear option” to shorten debate time for judicial and executive nominees.
I've written at length about why this is a bad idea, most recently here and here.
Prior to this action, the Senate allowed for up to 30 hours of debate on the nominees. Democrats actually have never used that time for debate, but the Senate has been allowing the 30 hours to run even without debate. McConnell had remedies for this sort of inaction that would have fallen well short of going nuclear.
The Senate's rules already allow a determined majority to speed up confirmations; this Senate is just too lazy to use them. Second, there are long-term consequences for consistently using the nuclear option as a problem-solving tool, and those consequences are likely to diminish minority rights in the Senate—critical for conservatives, who are always in the minority, even when Republicans have the majority.
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