here s the thing, philosophically the democrats and the caucus have a variety of perspectives. i ve argued, for example, let s restore the filibuster. if you have the leverage that comes from slowing things down, you have to be on the floor giving speeches. it s a public act. you did it in front of america and america can weigh in. are you heroes or are you bums. i argued that we should imply the two speech rule that has been in our rule since we were founded as a senate ask still in our rules today on final passage. these are using traditional rules of the senate but essentially applying them to the question of final passage of a bill. and that s the challenge. we never get to final passage now because always an amendment pending. so, that would be a beautiful thing. and i think it meets what my colleagues say when they say they don t want to get rid of 60 votes. well, there s two possible meanings to that. one, they want everything to be passed by 60 votes.
i think one thing overlooked it s possible to force an actual talking filibuster and get back to the traditions of the senate, if democrats want to filibuster this nomination, they should follow the advice of the heritage foundation, rachel bow vard wrote a piece in the hill today she talked about the two speech rule which would enforce a natural talking filibuster. that s what the people want to see. elizabeth, your thought on that? i think neil gorsuch is going to be confirmed this week but i think he ll be confirmed after senator mcconnell changes the rules. i agree wheith brian. i think it s a mistake. i think it really undermines the role of the senate. listen, the supreme court is it s a critical appointment they re dealing with. and they should be able to have some kind of middle ground consensus requirement that s what 60 votes does. the president has come up short in terms of his ability to find a consensus nominee and i think it s going to have a long term
secondly, it s not all clear to me that that s even going to become necessary. there are a lot of reasons why it might not be. senate democrats could still decide not to filibuster, if they do decide to filibuster, still very possible that we ll end up with 60 votes. even if that doesn t happen, we re still going to confirm this guy without regard to whether there s any need to deploy the nuclear option because we can invoke the two speech rule we stay in the same legitimative day and exhaust the ability of anyator to speak more than twice and there s no closure, we go straight to the final vote on the confirmation. let me ask you this as somebody who i think is you re well aware of article one versus article two. a lot of executive action coming out of the article two branch of government there in the executive branch, i assume a little too much for you? look, i want to be very clear about something, something that i spent a lot of time talking about while barack obama was presi
with lawmakers going after its new commissioner calling on him to squash the regulations governing the political activities of some nonprofits. it s what some are referring to as the obama administration s anti-free speech rule. commissioner koskinen needs to live up to what we told us when we confirmed him, when he led us to believe he d be an independent voice for reform. commissioner koskinen has a choice. he can be a hero like the irs commissioner who stood up to president nixon or he can just be another pawn of this administration. joining me now, katie pavolic, what was mitch mcconnell talking about? as a result of the irs targeting conservative groups that came up with these new regulations that broadly define who candidate-related activities are. they had an open comment period for these new regulations to the