Nobody does sad­ness like Har­ry Reid (D‑NV). His deflat­ed body slumped over the podi­um atop his Sen­ate desk, head shak­ing slow­ly, his faint raspy voice a mix­ture of res­ig­na­tion and exas­per­a­tion, Reid spends much of his time as the Senate’s most pow­er­ful fig­ure bemoan­ing his lack of power.

The bur­dens imposed by Repub­li­cans and Sen­ate rules seem more than the 73-year-old Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader can bear. To hear him tell it, Reid is beset by Repub­li­can “cra­zies,” who manip­u­late the insti­tu­tion’s rules to pre­vent him from doing all man­ner of won­der­ful things. Since he can’t rid him­self of Repub­li­cans, he would be done with restraints imposed by the rules.

Fil­i­buster is the Repub­li­can weapon of choice. Reid has filed clo­ture (a motion to cut off Sen­ate debate) 181 times since Pres­i­dent Oba­ma took office, and has gar­nered the req­ui­site 60 votes to invoke clo­ture only 115 times. He believes that the Sen­ate rules should be changed to restrict the right of Sen­a­tors to engage in debate. Changes to the Sen­ate rules, how­ev­er, require 67 votes. So Reid is con­tem­plat­ing the use of the so-called “nuclear option” to change Sen­ate rules by sim­ple major­i­ty vote.

Enlarg­ing Har­ry Reid’s pow­er by tram­pling the institution’s rules under foot is good for you. Just ask Har­ry Reid.

You might also ask him how 181 “fil­i­busters” have escaped pub­lic notice. Ordi­nar­i­ly when a Sen­a­tor takes the floor to speak at length on an issue, we hear about it. Dur­ing her fil­i­buster this past week against a bill that would have restrict­ed late-term abor­tions and required that abor­tions be per­formed in ambu­la­to­ry sur­gi­cal cen­ters, Texas State Sen­a­tor Wendy Davis, elec­tri­fied sup­port­ers, inspir­ing 400,000 reg­is­tered tweets with the hash­tag #stand­with­wendy.  Ear­li­er this year, US Sen­a­tor Rand Paul (R‑KY) under­took a fil­i­buster to protest the use of drones against U.S. cit­i­zens. He, too, attract­ed enor­mous atten­tion and sup­port and, accord­ing to some polls, moved pub­lic opin­ion in favor of his position.

Fil­i­busters get noticed. So how have we man­aged not to notice 181 fil­i­busters? Because there haven’t been 181 fil­i­busters. In the mind of the belea­guered Sen­a­tor Reid, the mere desire to debate or amend a bill is a fil­i­buster. When he brings a bill to the Sen­ate floor, he typ­i­cal­ly employs tac­tics to pre­vent it from being amend­ed. He then orders a clo­ture vote to choke off debate. And if Repub­li­cans don’t vote to end debate on a bill the Sen­ate hasn’t begun to debate, they are, by Reid’s reck­on­ing, engaged in a filibuster.

It’s inter­est­ing that when Reid has per­mit­ted amend­ment and debate, the Sen­ate has passed bills, includ­ing the immi­gra­tion reform bill just this past week, often with large, bipar­ti­san majori­ties.  Still, you can’t blame him for want­i­ng to get his way with­out hav­ing to endure an actu­al debate or for threat­en­ing to twist Sen­ate rules to grant him­self more pow­er. Every­where he looks, the oth­er branch­es of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment are breach­ing their lim­its. Why can’t he?

In recent months, we’ve learned that the Exec­u­tive Branch is brush­ing aside Fourth Amend­ment safe­guards by col­lect­ing our phone records, vio­lat­ing the First Amend­ment guar­an­tee of a free press by threat­en­ing to pros­e­cute reporters who pub­lished leaked infor­ma­tion, and ignor­ing First Amend­ment rights to orga­nize and protest gov­ern­ment actions by harass­ing groups seek­ing to obtain 501(c)(4) tax sta­tus. And those are just the things we’ve found out about.

This week, it was the judiciary’s turn to flex its mus­cles. In what may well be a record, the Supreme Court on suc­ces­sive days struck down key pro­vi­sions of two acts of Con­gress: the ven­er­a­ble Vot­ing Rights Act of 1965 and the Defense of Mar­riage Act (DOMA). What is most instruc­tive is to see how the jus­tices shift­ed their views on the lim­its of judi­cial pow­er in the two cases.

In her dis­sent from the Court’s rul­ing on the Vot­ing Rights Act, Jus­tice Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg expressed dis­may that five of her col­leagues could inval­i­date a law that had passed Con­gress by such large majorities.

“The ques­tion this case presents is who decides whether, as cur­rent­ly oper­a­tive, sec­tion 5 [of the Vot­ing Rights Act of 1965] remains jus­ti­fi­able, this Court, or a Con­gress charged with the oblig­a­tion to enforce the post-Civ­il War Amend­ments ‘by appro­pri­ate leg­is­la­tion.’ With over­whelm­ing sup­port in both Hous­es, Con­gress con­clud­ed that … sec­tion 5 should con­tin­ue in force, unabat­ed. … Those assess­ments were well with­in Con­gress’ province to make and should elic­it this Court’s unstint­ing appro­ba­tion” [Gins­burg dis­sent, p. 1.]

But in a rul­ing announced the very next day, Gins­burg chose not to give “unstint­ing appro­ba­tion” to DOMA, a bill that also had gar­nered “over­whelm­ing sup­port in both hous­es [of] Con­gress.” She joined in a major­i­ty opin­ion that effec­tive­ly dis­missed Con­gress as a hate group.  Jus­tice Scalia, in his dis­sent, described that opinion:

“The major­i­ty says that the sup­port­ers of this Act act­ed with malice—with the ‘pur­pose’ ‘to dis­par­age and to injure’ same-sex cou­ples. It says that the moti­va­tion for DOMA was to ‘demean,’ to ‘impose inequal­i­ty,’ to ‘impose … a stig­ma’; to deny peo­ple ‘equal dig­ni­ty’; to brand gay peo­ple as ‘unwor­thy’; and to ‘humiliat[e]’ their chil­dren … It is one thing for a soci­ety to elect change; it is anoth­er for a court of law to impose change by adjudg­ing those who oppose it … ene­mies of the human race.” [Scalia dis­sent, p. 21].

The deci­sion to strike down this act of Con­gress, accord­ing to Scalia, was an uncon­sti­tu­tion­al pow­er grab:

“This case is about pow­er in sev­er­al respects. It is about the pow­er of our peo­ple to gov­ern them­selves, and the pow­er of this Court to pro­nounce the law. Today’s opin­ion aggran­dizes the lat­ter, with the pre­dictable con­se­quence of dimin­ish­ing the for­mer. We have no pow­er to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no pow­er under the Con­sti­tu­tion to inval­i­date this demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly adopt­ed leg­is­la­tion. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same dis­eased root: an exalt­ed con­cep­tion of the role of this insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­ca” [Scalia dis­sent, p. 1].

It should be not­ed that Scalia did not scru­ple about vot­ing to “inval­i­date” the “demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly adopt­ed leg­is­la­tion” known as the Vot­ing Rights Act, which some might regard as reflect­ing his own “exalt­ed con­cep­tion” of the High Court’s role.

The upshot is that a shift­ing major­i­ty of jus­tices found their way to evis­cer­at­ing two acts of Con­gress in two days, enlarg­ing the pow­er of the judi­cia­ry at the expense of Con­gress and the President.

Chances are, you’re hap­py with the result of one or both of these rul­ings and don’t much care about the rea­son­ing the Court used to reach that result.  The result is good enough for you.  You may believe that Con­gress should update or repeal the Vot­ing Rights Act and there­fore wel­come the Court’s deci­sion to crip­ple it. Maybe you hate DOMA and pre­fer the Court’s edict to the hard work of per­suad­ing Con­gress to repeal it. Maybe you trust the NSA to keep us safe and don’t real­ly mind that they’ve found a way to cir­cum­vent the Fourth Amend­ment. Maybe you resent the dam­age leak­ers do and embrace the Jus­tice Department’s crack­down on reporters, what­ev­er its impli­ca­tions for press free­dom. Maybe you find Tea Par­ty groups insuf­fer­able and don’t think it’s a big deal that the IRS is screw­ing around with their appli­ca­tions. Maybe you think it would be bet­ter if the Sen­ate worked like the House, where the major­i­ty par­ty can hur­ried­ly pass bills with no amend­ments and lit­tle debate.

On the oth­er hand, maybe you find gov­ern­ment pow­er creep by all three fed­er­al branch­es a bit troubling.

I sure do.