If the democrats were serious, they could have deployed the "nuclear option" on this (suspend Senate rules). But of course there was more than one person's objection going on.
Ipso facto there weren't enough votes to suspend the 60-vote in the health care case.
But that's not always the case - Neil Gorsuch was confirmed by a vote to suspend the 60 vote rule. So the rule is available for things that a strong party consensus.
I think that's quibbling. If votes to abolish the rule for a case are available, it's reasonable for a single suspension vote to be possible to.
Both sorts of actions decrease the power of individual senators. If anything, abolishing for a whole category reduces senator's power more - if you also read the article, the basic point is the action indeed altered the power dynamic, what those considering individual senator power are worried about.
It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask whether the 60 vote threshold can survive for any kind of legislation in the future. In particular, here is an argument that American democracy is doomed because of the way partisanship ratchets towards more extreme mechanics over time: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doom...
However, it remains the case that in 2009, 59 senators were ready to vote for a public option, but there was no 60th. By contrast, there were nowhere close to even 50 votes for removing the filibuster and changing to a 50 vote threshold.
Please do not miss the fact that Lieberman had no rational justification for opposing the public option and that one of the keenest observers at the time accused him of being "driven more by a pathological dislike of the liberals who dogged him in 2006 than by any remotely rational policy judgment."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/12/lieberma...
> I think that's quibbling. If votes to abolish the rule for a case are available, it's reasonable for a single suspension vote to be possible to.
A suspension is both procedurally (or textually) more complicated (it either requires changing the rules twice, changing the rules to add a suspension provision and then acting separately to exercise it, or changing the rules to include a tailored exception that applied only to the case at issue) and more politically fraught (rather than publicly defending the case that the general rule is outdated, it requires legislators to defend that the rule is generally valid but should not be applied to the immediate case.) It's very much not the same thing as abolishing the filibuster for a well-defined class of cases.
This is particularly true in the Gorsuch case where the recent Democratic action to remove the filibuster from other Presidential appointees made applying the “nuclear option” to Supreme Court justices much less “nuclear” than it had seemed previously when it been considered.