Last weekend, Senator Claire McCaskill put pressure on obstructionist Republicans, announcing that she had enough votes to end the Senate practice of placing anonymous holds on executive nominees. As McCaskill explained in her recent Huffington Post piece, “someone, it seems, secretly has a problem with these nominations but they don't want to be open and transparent about it.”

Apparently, the pressure worked: on Tuesday, 60 backlogged Obama choices were finally cleared by the Senate after months of Republican stonewalling. The confirmations represented a small victory over Senate Republicans’ unprecedented obstructionism, which has plagued the last year and a half of crucial legislative work. The GOP has not only placed an absurd number of anonymous holds on executive nominees; they’ve also set an all-time record on misusing the filibuster to waste the Senate’s time and slow down important government business. Even after Tuesdays slew of confirmations, dozens of nominees remain unconfirmed – as compared to only thirteen at this time in George W. Bush’s presidency.

It’s clear that the Republicans in question don’t have substantive problems with the President’s nominees. Instead, they’re abusing Senate procedure to intentionally disrupt government functions. It’s time for a change in the way the Senate operates, and thanks to Senator McCaskill and her colleagues, we may soon have one.