Harry Reid and John McCain apparently just cut a deal which will avoid the "nuclear" or "constitutional" option of changing the Senate's rule that allows filibustering presidential (non-judicial) appointees. Yesterday I wrote about the meeting which produced this deal, so I thought it was worth writing a followup article now that a deal has been reached.

Was it a good deal or a bad deal? Well, that's rather subjective. Even answering whether it was a good deal or a bad deal specifically for Democrats or Republicans involves some degree of bias. On the whole, personally, I think it's a pretty good deal, but then others may see it differently, I realize.

The deal will allow immediate up-or-down votes on something like 15 presidential appointees, and the first one voted on was symbolically important. Richard Cordray's nomination moved forward with a whopping 71 "yea" votes, which included 17 Republicans and all the chamber's Democrats. The fight over Cordray's appointment (and, previously, Elizabeth Warren's nomination for the job) has been a long and ugly one, so it's no wonder Reid moved that one to the front of the line. Finally, after a multi-year delay caused by Republican obstructionism, there will be a confirmed leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- that is reason enough to call the deal a pretty good one, in my book.

Democrats got pretty much everything they wanted, in regards to moving the nominating process forward and removing Republican roadblocks which have been delaying such votes. The handshake deal allows the Senate to function properly, at least for the next month or so.

Of course, in any compromise, everyone's not going to be happy with every aspect. Such is the nature of compromise -- a statement which, in normal times, wouldn't even be necessary, but due to the rarity of actual compromise on Capitol Hill these days it must be specified. The Republicans got their pound of flesh out of the deal, too. Republicans got Reid (and, by extension, President Obama) to concede defeat over two people sitting on the National Labor Relations Board. This is rather complicated, because of the ongoing legal fight over the constitutionality of Obama's recess-appointing them (the conservative circuit court ruled against Obama, but who knows how the Supreme Court would have ruled on them?). Obama apparently agreed to nominate two different people to serve on the Board, which will allow the other three vacancies on the five-person Board to be filled before the Board loses the ability to operate in a few months. So Republicans got rid of two people currently on the Board -- which, for them, is a minor victory.

Even this Republican victory, however, isn't all that bad for Democrats, as the deal will allow Obama to name two Labor-approved nominees to take their place. So while it's tough for the two who won't be confirmed, overall it's not all that bad for the Board or for Labor. Or for Democrats, for that matter.

This appears to be the single concession made to Republicans in the deal. They were pushing for far more, though. Republicans wanted Harry Reid to forswear ever threatening the nuclear option again, which did not happen. Harry still has this tool in his toolbox, should he ever need it in the future. Important Obama nominees to agencies like the EPA will be confirmed in the next few weeks. Republicans will not block nominees just because they don't like the agencies anymore. Harry Reid looked pretty good, coming out of the deal.

The icing on the cake of this deal for the Left, however, is that Mitch McConnell took a rather large hit politically with the deal's announcement. McConnell reportedly didn't have anything to do with putting the deal together, which is kind of astonishing seeing as how he's supposed to be the leader of the Senate Republicans. McConnell was refusing to dicker, according to news reports, so John McCain dusted off his "Maverick" hat and cut the deal behind McConnell's back. That's pretty embarrassing for McConnell, when you think about it. McCain was reportedly so sick of his own party's rabid obstructionism that he talked some of his own party members into breaking ranks and cutting a deal. Seeing as how 17 of them voted with Democrats on the first test vote for Cordray, it looks like McCain was pretty successful, too.

I have no idea how the Right will react to the deal. The hardliners were just fine with filibustering everyone Obama nominated, so this has to be a rather large disappointment for them, one would think. Wall Street has always hated the concept of the CFPB to begin with, and the Republicans have been doing their bidding in a backdoor attempt to strangle the Board in its infancy. This logjam has now been broken, which must also be a disappointment for the big-money wing of the Republican Party. John McCain led a low-level revolt against Republican leadership, and splintered off a significant portion of his party's total Senate seats. Whether this translates into further cross-aisle compromise in the chamber remains to be seen, but it's got to be worrisome for the Republicans who have pinned all their hopes on just saying "No" to everything. The one thing the Right can feel happy about -- Obama essentially being forced to withdraw two people from the NLRB -- will be short-lived when Obama names two others with equally-acceptable credentials to Labor.

From my point of view, the Democrats got the most out of the bargain the Senate just struck, and Republicans got the short end of the stick. Maybe that's just me, though. I will be very interested to hear the reactions across the political spectrum in the next few days, to see how everyone else reads this deal. For now, though, I'm going to go with "pretty good" as a descriptor of the Reid-McCain bargain.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant