But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel
and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested
on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

More important is the disgusting and deranged implication of death camps and
genocide towards Byrd's political opponents just because they propose to change
the Senate's rules -- not laws, just the internal rules -- to allow for majority
rule on one particular task. Perhaps this point eludes someone who spent the
Nazi years belonging to a group that paralleled the same racial philosophies of
Hitler himself, but Byrd should know better than to demean the millions of
victims of the real Nazis by invoking them as an insult to people who simply
oppose Byrd politically.