Harry Reid pushing the ‘nuclear button’ was one of the fractures that broke our political system. And Reid suddenly came back from retirement to campaign for the end of the filibuster.

Entirely.

It’s an odd time for this particular fantasy with Republicans holding the Senate. But why stand between a crazy leftist and his dream?

Reid’s argument is that Democrats won’t be able to implement their agenda, in a hypothetical scenario in which they take the White House and the Senate until the filibuster (and all checks and balances are eliminated). But, in the real world, Trump is in the White House and Mitch McConnell is setting the Senate agenda. Reid is preemptively proposing that the Democrats implement one-party rule at a time when it would favor the GOP.

That doesn’t mean that this isn’t a serious problem.

Checks and balances make our political system possible. The closer we move to one-party rule, the more elections become a zero-sum game. And when the stakes are the civil rights of half the country, that’s dark territory. It’s civil war territory.

Reid’s philosophy already ended with a much more solidly Republican judiciary. His answer is to double down and break the system even harder.