The Democrats have finally pushed through a sort-of filibuster reform but it really is a case of too little, too late.

Too little:

After years of threats and warnings, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and his Democratic majority on Thursday executed the "nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster for executive branch and judicial nominees, except for the Supreme Court.

...

The "Reid Rule," as supporters are calling it, does not affect the minority party's ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominees or legislation.

(Leave it to Democrats to splice things out to this degree. Only for appointments! Oh but not Supreme Court appointments!)

Too late: Even if this reform had affected legislation, we're way past the point where Democrats would have benefited from it. The time to do this was in 2008, when Republicans were already telegraphing the fact that they were going to filibuster everything that the Democrats did, and when the Dems had majorities in both houses. Even now, it's been five years of Obama's appointments getting held up.

Any idiot could have seen this abuse of the filibuster coming years ago, but it took the Dems this long to do something about it, and even now only partially. Still, let's hope this opens the floodgates.

And just to be clear, i'm completely for Republicans not being stymied by abuse of the filibuster either. Their lopsided abuse of the filibuster in recent years is well documented, but i still think when they are elected to govern, they should have the ability to govern. That doesn't mean the Democrats should disarm unilaterally - as long as the filibuster exists they should use it to the fullest extent because you know the Republicans will - but it does mean i accept that there can be negative (from my perspective) consequences of getting rid of it.