Chaos without the filibuster?

In The Atlantic, Stuart Taylor writes from the imaginary perpective of post-election 2008 and sees disaster for the Republicans -- all following from abandoning the filibuster:

The Republican Party's stunningly swift swoon from controlling the presidency, the House, and the Senate to losing all three is rooted in what conservatives saw not long ago as their greatest triumph.

That was the use of an unprecedented parliamentary power play in April 2005 to ban filibusters of judicial nominees and the subsequent takeover of the Supreme Court by Bush-appointed justices bent on rolling back decades of liberal precedents....

With Democrats thus neutered, the Senate narrowly confirmed in near-party-line votes all of Bush's choices to succeed Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Stevens. Once on the Court, the three new justices allied with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas to form the most cohesive, conservative majority bloc in seven decades....

[T]he specter of a conservative Republican steamroller taking over the judicial as well as the executive and legislative branches—and then engineering sudden, sweeping change in previously settled interpretations of the Constitution—eclipsed debate over the individual merits of the Court's decisions. A lot of voters found the whole business scary.

Stuart's nightmare scenario has the Court suddenly overruling all sorts of cases -- bringing back "The Constitution in Exile" and so forth. Is the filibuster all that keeps us from tumbling into a chaotic, frenzied remaking of constitutional law? Supreme Court nominees would still need a majority vote in the Senate, and surely at least some Republican Senators would worry about extreme Justices, if for no other reason than the effect it would have on the party's future. The new Justices themselves would be wary about excessively disrupting settled expectations. And don't be so sure that Justices Scalia and Thomas would not see the value of adhering to precedent. In what is regarded as one of Thomas's most extreme federalism opinions, his concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez (which struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act), Thomas wrote:

Although I might be willing to return to the original understanding, I recognize that many believe that it is too late in the day to undertake a fundamental reexamination of the past 60 years. Consideration of stare decisis and reliance interests may convince us that we cannot wipe the slate clean.

So Stuart's scenario strikes me as the opposite of David Brooks' overly rosy prediction of how things would play out if Roe v. Wade were overturned (which I critiqued here). Stuart's exaggerated picture does not adequately take into account how other players in the system would respond at each step.