The coming war over climate change and judicial nominations, by @DavidOAtkins

The biggest piece of President Obama’s second-term agenda is his widely expected plan for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new carbon regulations for power plants, a move that could bring the United States in line with the greenhouse-gas-reduction goals it agreed to in Copenhagen and open the way for an international treaty to control climate change. If the administration unveils such a plan, conservatives will undoubtedly challenge its legality. The legal challenge won’t take place for two years, but the two sides are preparing for war already. The field of battle will be the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C.

The D.C. Circuit, as the appeals court covering legal issues arising within the nation’s capital, has assumed a large and growing influence in the ideological wars over the scope of government, and over the last decade its appointments have provoked bitter conflict. During George W. Bush’s second term, Democratic senators filibustered D.C. circuit nominees they considered extreme, causing Republicans to threaten to eliminate the filibuster for judges. Democrats called the threat the “nuclear option,” and the two sides negotiated a resolution when Democrats backed down and agreed not to filibuster judges except in extraordinary circumstances. Bush’s judges on the D.C. Circuit have inserted themselves even more heavily into the policy debate by striking down a slew of regulations in health care, pollution, labor, and other areas, turning the court into one of the right’s most potent weapons during the Obama era.

The Republicans don’t have the votes to actually pass their plan to eliminate all vacancies. Its function is to serve as justification for filibustering any nominees at all, however moderate or well qualified, for the remaining three vacancies. These are the battle lines forming for what appears to be a major partisan war this summer: Republicans insisting not only that they need not approve vacancies in the D.C. Circuit but that Obama’s attempt to fill them represents a kind of tyranny, and Democrats threatening to limit the filibuster as a routine weapon to obstruct appointments. Many things depend on the outcome of this fight, but the prospect for limiting climate change is surely the biggest.

Reid is eying the possibility of changing the rules via the “nuclear option” — a simple majority vote — to end filibustering on nominations, but not on legislation.

Lending some weight to this threat, the Huffington Post reports that Reid is delaying the push to confirm Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau until July, after immigration reform is done. A Reid aide tells HuffPo that this is about postponing a major war over all of Obama’s nominees until July — which is also Reid’s target to trigger the nuclear option if necessary.

This — along with Reid’s public statements today — amounts to the sharpest line yet drawn by Reid. The Senate Majority Leader has been striking a delicate balancing act. His challenge has been to slowly escalate the threat level by giving his threats ever more specificity, while simultaneously maintaining an aura of credibility about them. The current threat comes very close to saying that if Republicans obstruct Cordray — and others, such as Gina McCarthy to head the EPA, and Thomas Perez as Labor Secretary — then Reid will push the nuke button.

Indeed, as Sahil Kapur notes, if the GOP blocks those nominations, the pressure on Reid to press the button will get very intense indeed. Major Democratic constituencies (labor, environmentalists) have a big stake in these nominees, and the consumer protection bureau represents a major component of one of Obama’s signature domestic initiatives — Wall Street reform.