The real nuclear option: How health care could end

Bayh, who has argued in a New York Times op-ed that the number of votes required to overcome a filibuster should be reduced from 60 to 55, appeared to give the green light for using the nuclear option.

“That will be … a very interesting moment,” Bayh said. “I assume that our friends on the Republican side will think that they’ve been violated and people on our side will say, ‘Look, this should be about substance rather than form. We think it’s right for the American public.’”

There has been much talk recently about the role Vice President Joe Biden in all of this. The vice president is president of the Senate and could, in the event of a vote to invoke the nuclear option ending a filibuster with 51 votes, cast the deciding vote while presiding over the Senate from the chair.

But Biden is needed only if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, can only get to 50 votes. Biden could also choose to sit in the chair for symbolic or political purposes.

Nonetheless, a request that Republican amendments be ruled “dilatory,” or meant to delay, would have to originate on the Senate floor and come from a senator. The chair, either Biden or another senator, could grant the ruling or deny it.

Either way, 51 votes are all that’s required to overturn the ruling of the chair or to uphold it when Republicans appeal the ruling. That is the nuclear option.

In that scenario, Republicans who pushed for the nuclear option in 2005 would have weakened grounds to protest the use of the tactic by Democrats.

Democrats would face the same problem if they pursued the strategy. They cried foul in 2005, and a chorus of their own words would be thrown back at them.

Reid, then the Senate Minority Leader, said in 2005 that the use of the nuclear option by the GOP would “do harm forever to this country and to this institution.”

Reid also said: “If ever there were an example of an abuse of power, this is it. The filibuster is the last check we have against the abuse of power in Washington.”

However, a GOP parliamentary expert on the rules of the Senate and House said that such an action could be plausible if it happened “late at night, after two days of nonstop deliberations.”

“They might be able to conceal its true import,” said the Republican expert, who asked to not be identified. “They would probably characterize it as merely allowing the majority to bring the question to finality, but in reality, it would have a greater long-turn impact on the institution.”

“That’s the one that worries me the most, as it would be an outright abuse of minority rights, and change the Senate forever.”