Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are closing in on a deal that would avert the “nuclear option” on the filibuster but would pare back its use in several instances, sources said Wednesday. 
 
 No deal is final, sources said, but a bipartisan accord to avert a messy partisan showdown could be announced as soon as Thursday. 
 
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 The exact contents of the package remain murky, but Reid is expected to win GOP concessions to speed debate during a handful of occasions, including to end filibusters intended to prevent debate from beginning on bills. 
 
 Reid (D-Nev.) has been pushing McConnell (R-Ky.) to drop the amount of procedural votes needed to enter a conference with the House, something the two men appear close to agreeing on. Reid has also been demanding that senators stop the practice of extending debate for 30 hours once a Senate filibuster has been defeated. And he’s called for expedited consideration of certain presidential nominations. 
 
 In the private talks, McConnell has sought to ensure Republicans get at least two amendments on bills during floor debates, sources say. And Reid appears poised to grant the request, sources say. 
 
 Reid appears to have made some concessions. He had proposed to require senators mounting a filibuster to come up with the 41 votes to do so. Current rules require those trying to defeat a filibuster to find 60 votes. Reid appears to have dropped that proposal in his talks with McConnell, sources say. 
 
 And Reid has already dropped the so-called “talking filibuster,” a plan sought by liberals in his caucus and that would require senators to carry out a stalling session on the floor, rather than threaten them. Critics in both parties worried that it would virtually eliminate the filibuster. 
 
 A deal with McConnell would prevent Reid from taking the precedent-setting move of changing the rules by 51 votes, rather than 67, a move critics dub the “nuclear option” but supporters call the “constitutional option.” Future majorities could cite the precedent to change whatever rules they want, critics fear, eroding the power of the minority. 
 
 But Reid has grown furious at what he sees as GOP obstruction, and McConnell has demanded that the majority leader allow the GOP more opportunities to amend legislation. 
 
 A deal would still allow the GOP to filibuster in a number of other situations, including to end debate and prevent an up-or-down vote. And 60 votes would still be needed to overcome a filibuster. ||||| Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s threat to change filibuster rules is supposed to narrowly focus on presidential nominees to the executive branch. 
 
 But his potential move to invoke the “nuclear option” is raising a bigger and more sweeping question that could have huge consequences for future presidents of both parties: Is this the beginning of the end of the filibuster? If the filibuster goes, the Senate would lose a crucial check on majority rights — and it could start looking very much like the House, where the majority always gets its way. 
 
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 For years, the filibuster has been increasingly used as a tool to block, delay and frustrate the will of the majority party to push through its agenda. While the filibuster has been changed periodically over the years, senators have never successfully made good on their threat to impose the “nuclear option” — changing Senate cloture rules by 51 votes, rather than 67 — for fear it would hurt them one day when they were back in the minority. 
 
 (PHOTOS: Longest filibusters in history) 
 
 But those days may now be over. 
 
 On Monday, Reid informed President Barack Obama about his intention to use the nuclear option if no deal is struck, sources said, and Obama signaled he would support the effort. 
 
 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is trying to head off the high-stakes fight, privately reached out to Vice President Joe Biden, but it’s expected that Biden would vote with Democrats in case there’s a 50-50 tie. 
 
 The crisis could still be averted. Reid signaled that he would drop the threat of the nuclear option if Republicans ended their filibusters on pending Obama nominees. 
 
 But senators in both parties agreed Thursday that if Reid moves to change the rules by 51 votes, it would be used by the majority in the future to further weaken the filibuster, potentially eliminating the potent procedural weapon altogether one day. While Democrats said they were willing to roll the dice on the nuclear option, believing the GOP would go that route anyway when they get back in the majority, Republicans said Reid’s move all but assured a continued weakening — and eventual demolition — of the filibuster. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Reid slams McConnell, ready for nuclear option) 
 
 But Reid said privately it is time to make a change. 
 
 In a closed-door caucus meeting Thursday, Reid began by apologizing to his colleagues for cutting bipartisan deals to avert the nuclear option, including at the beginning of this year. And the Nevada Democrat complained that he allowed votes on scores of conservative nominees under former President George W. Bush after a bipartisan coalition headed off the nuclear option in 2005. But Reid said it had been the right thing to do because Bush had won a second term in the White House. 
 
 Now, Reid argued, times have changed. 
 
 “I ate sh— on some of those nominees,” Reid told his colleagues, according to sources who were present. 
 
 On Thursday, the Senate continued to inch closer to a battle that could have dramatic implications for the institution. 
 
 “I don’t know how you open that door and not go to the next level. First, it’s executive nominations, next thing it’ll be judicial nominations, then it will be legislative filibusters,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 3 Senate Republican. “The precedent they set here will be not only long-lasting but far-reaching.” 
 
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 Under Reid’s proposal, the Senate would no longer need 60 votes to break a filibuster on executive branch positions, bringing down that threshold to 51 votes. Senators would face a 60-vote requirement to end filibusters on legislation and judicial nominees. 
 
 At the heart of the fight are a handful of nominees Reid has been pushing to confirm. On Thursday, he set up procedural votes on a slate of nominees, but Republicans are poised to block Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as nominees for the National Labor Relations Board. These nominees are at the center of an ongoing legal struggle over the legality of Obama’s use of recess appointment power to place them at the agencies. ||||| Senators said nearly all of them spoke, some passionately, for or against a change to the rules, which would ostensibly only end filibusters of presidential nominees for executive branch positions but could possibly pave the way to further limit the filibuster in the future. 
 
 Advocates of the change said Democrats would stay the course for a showdown on Tuesday. “It was a very good discussion, but at this point, we’re headed to votes” that will probably trigger the change, said Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico and a leading advocate of weakening the filibuster. 
 
 Most other senators said they thought their leaders would bring them back from the brink. 
 
 A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said, “A clear bipartisan majority in the meeting believed the leaders ought to find a solution.” 
 
 “We just need to give them 24 hours,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. 
 
 Senators from both parties said they were seeking an alternative to Mr. Reid’s vow to ask a majority of members to ban filibusters against executive nominations, though he would leave the storied procedural option intact for judicial nominees and legislation. 
 
 “This is a moment in history where circumstances dictate the need for change,” Mr. Reid said in a speech at the liberal Center for American Progress. He suggested that the only way for Republicans to avoid the rules change was to acquiesce to straight up-or-down votes on Tuesday on seven nominees in question and stop filibustering executive nominations in the future. 
 
 “I love the Senate, but right now the Senate is broken and needs to be fixed,” he said. 
 
 Republicans expressed outrage at the proposal and promised to retaliate. But for a Senate that has increasingly found itself tied in procedural knots, the decisions at hand were potentially momentous. Republicans to the last minute were preparing offers of compromise, but Democratic leaders said they had the votes and the wherewithal to pull the trigger on the most significant change since the early 1970s in the way the Senate operates. 
 
 Although Mr. Reid insisted that the change was extremely narrow, it had the potential to be the beginning of the end of the filibuster — and to eliminate the need for supermajorities to get anything done in Congress’s upper chamber. 
 
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 Mr. Reid’s position could be a bluff to gain leverage to force the nominees through. Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, both Republicans, were in negotiations with two Democrats, Carl Levin of Michigan and Max Baucus of Montana, to find a way out. But most senators said it was now up to Senators Reid and McConnell. 
 
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 “I want a solution,” Mr. Baucus said. “That’s by far better for everyone, by far.” 
 
 After the meeting, Mr. McConnell offered Democrats up-or-down votes on all seven contested nominations in exchange for a promise to drop the rule-change threat. Mr. Reid demanded a pledge not to filibuster future nominations. Both sides balked, according to aides familiar with the exchange. 
 
 Signs earlier on Monday pointed to Mr. Reid exercising a version of what has come to be known as the “nuclear option” — meaning that rather than the 67 votes usually needed to change the Senate rules, Democrats would do so with a majority, a move that could, in the short run, eviscerate what comity is left in the chamber, and, in the longer term, fundamentally change the institution. 
 
 “It’s almost hard to measure the ramifications that would emanate from such an action,” said Olympia J. Snowe, a former Republican senator from Maine who helped head off an earlier showdown over judicial nominees. “Once you go down that path, you cannot know how this will reverberate on the institution for generations.” 
 
 Without a deal, Mr. Reid planned to move to cut off debate on Tuesday morning on the nomination of Richard Cordray, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to become the new agency’s first permanent chief. Republicans have blocked confirmation of any director of the bureau — including Elizabeth Warren, now a Democratic senator from Massachusetts — because they opposed the bureau’s creation and want changes to the way it is financed and overseen. 
 
 If Mr. Reid failed to get 60 votes, he could move to change the rules of the Senate immediately. If debate were cut off, it would postpone action until the Senate moved on to limit debate on three nominees to fill vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board. 
 
 Again, Republicans could simply let them go through, but Mr. McConnell has taken a firm stance on two of the nominees, Richard Griffin and Sharon Block. President Obama initially appointed them to the labor board without the Senate’s consent in a disputed “recess appointment,” a move struck down by a federal appeals court. 
 
 The nominees have been at the center of the fight, and Democrats point to either Mr. Griffin or Ms. Block as the nuclear trigger. If they clear the threshold, the showdown will continue through the day with votes to end debate on President Obama’s labor secretary nominee, Thomas E. Perez; his nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy; and Fred P. Hochberg, nominated to continue as the president of the Export-Import Bank. Those three were expected to win 60 votes. 
 
 “This may be one of those moments, as we discussed in the last meeting we were in, where the Senate actually acts in a spontaneous way and does something,” Mr. Corker said. 
 
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 Democrats seemed to be spoiling for a fight. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, a moderate Democrat who teamed with 13 other senators in 2005 to stop the Republican Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, from ending filibusters on judicial nominees, said the Senate had fundamentally changed. 
 
 “This place has come to complete gridlock,” Ms. Landrieu said. “Something has to change.” 
 
 Mr. Reid was careful to say he had no intention of taking the rules change from stopping filibusters on executive branch nominations to ending filibusters on judicial nominations or legislation pending before the Senate. He said he believed that a Republican president should also have the right for nominees to be approved by majority vote. 
 
 He also said that the 60-vote threshold on legislation helped both conservative and liberal causes. For instance, he said, during the gun control debate in the spring, Republicans drafted legislation to make it mandatory for every state to recognize any other state’s laws on concealed weapons. The 60-vote threshold prevented it from passing.
– Harry Reid says he's ready—no really, he means it this time—to use the so-called "nuclear option" to reform the filibuster. Reid says that unless Republicans allow him to move forward on a host of Obama administration nominees, he'll use a parliamentary maneuver to change the rules allowing them to block the nominees in the first place, the New York Times reports. The threat sent a jolt through the Senate yesterday. Some highlights from the fracas: "The place doesn't work," Reid said of the Senate in a floor speech justifying the move. "The American people know the dysfunction we have here. And all we're asking is let the president have his team." Mitch McConnell was apoplectic. "This will kill the Senate," he declared at one point, saying Reid would go down as "the worst leader of the Senate ever." "Please. Please," Reid rejoined. "If anyone thinks ... the norms and traditions of the Senate have been followed by the Republican leader, they’re living in Gaga Land." That back and forth followed a closed-door heart to heart with Democrats in which Reid apologized for past deals to avoid the nuclear option (particularly this one) and lamented all the Bush nominees he'd let through after relenting in a similar 2005 filibuster showdown. "I ate sh-- on some of those nominees," Reid said, according to Politico. Republican Bob Corker wants to mend fences. "We need to understand your grievances more," he told Reid. Roger Wicker, meanwhile, has asked Reid to hold a bipartisan meeting in the Old Senate Chamber on Monday. The change Reid is proposing is actually pretty modest, New York explains, saying he's killing only "the newest and most abusive use of the filibuster." McConnell and Co. have been blocking any nominees necessary to enforce laws Republicans disagree with, but can't change. But many worry the change could signal the doom of the filibuster entirely. Asked if Democrats were stepping on a slippery slope, Barbara Mikulski quipped, "Every slope is slippery. That's why they call it a slope."