At least temporarily, the reasonable Hugh Hewitt I used to read every day is back:
What needs to happen is a bipartisan agreement, formalized in a new rule, on how all nominations should be handled –with no blue slips, no “holds,” no endless delays, no last minute witnesses appearing with conjured up tales of harassment, no filibusters. Perhaps more nominees without majority support will lose –and on simple ideological grounds– but at least we can start to drain the swamp.
I think that is all something we can get behind, although it will be impossible. The way the Senate avoided the partisan brinksmanship we have witnessed over the past few years was with blue slips and rule 4 and other maneuvers like this. When we came to power, we stripped the Democrats of all of these things, thus forcing them to resort to the filibuster.
In other words, if you want give and take, you are going to have to go back to the pre-2002 way of businessm or just admit that what you want is majority rule with no exceptions.
At any rate, it is nice to see the normal Hugh back.