When Harry Reid came in through a side door to the Mansfield Room Thursday afternoon, the majority leader was met with a raucous standing ovation from a crowd of activists mere steps from the Senate floor where he had just successfully led a change of Senate rules to reform the filibuster.

It doesn't make for a very healthy or helpful environment, said one Senator in an understatement.

A bitterly divided Senate voted Thursday to eliminate filibusters for most Presidential nominees, a momentous and politically risky step that limits the ability of Republicans to block President Obama's choices for executive-branch and most judicial posts.

He once called the 'nuclear option' an "un-American" move that would destroy the Senate and ruin our country. But on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did it anyway.

Senate Democrats triggered the nuclear option Thursday, using a shortcut to undercut the chamber's filibuster rules and giving President Obama a clear path to stack the federal judiciary with ideological allies.

Senators on both sides of the aisle have threatened to pass the nuclear option for years in order to put an end to increasingly abused filibusters, but Thursday's vote to finally invoke the controversial measure upended nearly a century of tradition in the Senate.

During his radio show on Thursday, Rush Limbaugh reacted to the Democrat-led U.S. Senate passing the nuclear option that essentially stops the GOP from filibustering presidential nominees.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's move Thursday to make possible the confirmation of presidential nominees with a simple majority marks a tectonic shift in the rules and folkways of the Senate.

Back in 2005, then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist called this idea "the constitutional option" when he came close to invoking it on behalf of the judicial nominees of President George W. Bush.

Senate Democrats dropped the filibuster bomb Thursday, and now the question is what kind of fallout will result from the so-called nuclear option.

By a 52-48 vote, the Senate ended the ability of minority Republicans to continue using filibusters to block some of President Barack Obama's judicial and executive nominations, despite the vehement objections of Republicans.

Majority Democrats then quickly acted on the change by ending a filibuster against one of Obama's nominees for a federal appeals court.

President Obama on Thursday expressed strong support for Senate Democrats’ move to enact the so-called “nuclear option” and alter congressional rules to clear the way for judicial and other executive nominees.