Republicans in the U.S. Senate have routinely used the filibuster — and the threat of the filibuster — to deny President Obama and the Democrats their legislative agenda. In their defense, Republicans point out that the use of this parliamentary method of blocking votes is nothing new. Democrats filibustered some of George W. Bush’s appointees. Southern Dixiecrats used it in spectacular fashion to block civil rights legislation for decades.

But now there is evidence that the filibuster has flourished uniquely under the Republican Senate minority of recent years. Professor Sheldon Goldman, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, found that in the current Congress, Obama’s nominees have faced a level of obstruction that is “the highest that’s ever been recorded.… In this last Congress it approached total obstruction or delay.”

Goldman concludes that the level of obstruction since 2010 is significantly higher than in any of the years Bush was president and Democrats were a minority in the Senate — the parallel to the current situation. Furthermore, from the Alliance for Justice:

During President Obama’s first term, current vacancies [in the judicial branch] have risen by 51%.  This trend stands in stark contrast to President Clinton and President [George W.] Bush’s first four years, when vacancies declined by 65% and 34%, respectively.

Today’s partisan maneuvering is far more vicious than what happened under the previous Democratic minority. Back then, Democrats blocked a few individuals here and there, such as when they filibustered Miguel Estrada, Bush’s nominee to the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (they did eventually allow a vote on the confirmation of Thomas B. Griffith to the same seat). Nowadays, the Senate minority is seeking to block as many nominees as possible in order to prevent Obama from moving the judiciary in a direction that fits with his thinking. Republican senators don’t even have the votes to defeat these nominees because voters elected a Democratic Senate majority as well as a Democratic president.

And the filibuster is not just being used with judicial nominees. Republicans are determined to  stop two major government agencies from being able to function: the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Board. The NLRB goes back to legislation passed in 1935, but Republicans have decided that they will filibuster the nomination of any new members, effectively incapacitating the board now that the terms of three of its five members have expired.

As for the CFPB, Republicans plan to filibuster the nomination of anyone to be its director, in hopes of denying the agency certain powers that can only be exercised by someone holding that title. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum, writing in The Nation, has argued that the GOP’s actions here are “explicitly aimed at shutting down these agencies,” and called them an attempt at “nullification.” In other words, if you don’t like a law, use the filibuster to neutralize it. If you don’t like the results of an election, use the filibuster to sabotage the other side’s agenda. It does not matter that Obama has been elected and reelected president. Republicans have made a decision that they will use the filibuster, the hold, and other tactics to ensure that he is simply unable to place people into the judiciary and various executive-branch positions.

Goldman’s analysis gives statistical backing to the claims of many Washington insiders, who acknowledge the ways that Democrats have contributed to political gridlock and yet are increasingly unwilling or unable to defend the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans. In a recent book, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein — well-respected voices in the Beltway crowd — argue that Congressional dysfunction has reached a dangerous level, thanks in large part to the extremism of Republicans, whom Mann and Ornstein characterize as “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At last, Obama has decided to push back. He recently nominated three people to the D.C. Circuit, the same federal court that Estrada was nominated for, considered the second-highest court in the land and a stepping-stone to the Supreme Court. It is worth noting that — despite Republican claims that there’s no need to fill the three openings on that court because it is “underworked” — there are now 188 pending cases per judge, up from 119 in 2005. Clearly, those openings need to be filled.

There is talk that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will consider doing away with the filibuster for all nominations to the judiciary or executive branch if this obstruction continues. Obama has told Reid he supports such a move. Reid can do so with the assent of a simple majority of senators, but such an action is so controversial that pundits have taken to calling it the “nuclear option.”

It’s time to go nuclear. The facts that Goldman’s study lays out make it clear that Senate Republicans don’t believe Democrats, even when they win an election, should be allowed to govern. After the last election, Reid agreed to modest measures of “filibuster reform” that Republicans promptly ignored. Now it’s time to call out their strategy of blanket obstruction for what it is: the subversion of democracy.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

What is it that makes people capable of hacking another human being to death on a peaceful street? It is a question that demands asking after last week’s brutal murder of a British soldier. The suspects, captured on cellphone video, are two men who claimed they were avenging Muslims killed by British armed forces.

One easy answer is: Islam, or a bit more subtly, radical Islam. After the bombing of the Boston Marathon — whose perpetrators similarly cited U.S. military aggression against Muslims — conservative commentator Erik Rush called Islam “wholly incompatible with Western society.” Another alternative is to take the terrorists at their word and characterize these murderous acts as “blowback” resulting from Western imperialism. This is the position taken by people like Glenn Greenwald, who argues that although the U.S. isn’t totally to blame for the attacks by extremist Muslims on Western targets, it must accept the lion’s share of that blame.

Greenwald recently clashed with Bill Maher, another liberal commentator, on this matter. Greenwald certainly has a point, and is far more thoughtful than extremists like Erik Rush. Going back at least to the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister and made the Shah an absolute monarch, U.S. policy has indirectly fueled radicalism in Muslim countries. Britain and other European states have mucked around in the Middle East even longer. Nevertheless, Maher also makes the point that — in the twenty-first century at least — only Muslims react with such widespread violence to blasphemous writings or cartoons. This kind of fanaticism may be waning, however, and Western Christians are perfectly willing to murder innocents as well: recent examples include the Norwegian who massacred seventy-seven people to “protect” his country from Islam and multiculturalism, and the white supremacist who gunned down six of his fellow Americans in a Wisconsin Sikh temple. What motivates any of these terrorist murders?

The question is not easy to answer. What it comes down to, I suspect, is a combination of hate and fear, which feed upon each other. The violence begets more violence, a vicious cycle of bloodshed that becomes increasingly difficult to halt. What I can say with more certainty, though, is that we should be highly suspicious of anyone who claims to have a simple answer.

As many moderate Muslims know well, their communities need to be more vocal in standing up to fanaticism, and more willing to tolerate those who have different beliefs. Yes, there are religious extremists and terrorists among non-Muslims in the West as well. But the Muslim world has numerous theocratic states (Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.), along with radical Islamist movements and insurgencies in a number of countries. So let’s not make false equivalencies.

On the other hand, Western governments need to help the moderates fight extremism in their countries by shrinking its military footprint abroad. With the end of the U.S. presence in Iraq and, a year from now, a drastic reduction in the number of coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, that is already happening, but a greater drawdown there and elsewhere is needed.

At the same time, the U.S. cannot wall itself off from the world’s problems. It must protect its citizens (who include millions of Muslim Americans) from those violent extremists who would harm them — whatever the reason. And it has to figure out a way to do so that does not simply end up increasing the number of such people. Squaring that circle is the only way to end the cycle of violence and hate that has plagued relations between the Western and Muslim worlds for far too long.

Ian Reifowitz Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz