A few moments ago, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to announce a five-point agreement on rules reform. But the five-points weren’t, well, the point. The real agreement was on the process by which rules can be reformed.
“As part of this compromise,” Reid said, “we’ve agreed that I won’t force a majority vote to fundamentally change the Senate — that is the so-called ‘constitutional option’ — and he [McConnell] won’t in the future.” In other words, Reid and McConnell have agreed that the Senate’s rules cannot — or at least should not — be decided by a simple majority. That was what the constitutional option was about, and that’s what Reid explicitly rejected in his speech. Why? “Both McConnell and Reid feared what would happen if they were in the minority,” explains a Reid aide.
Full Story: Ezra Klein – Reid and McConnell agree: There will be no reform of the filibuster