Dems “failed to muster 60 votes to stop a GOP filibuster”: sound familiar?

How many times in the last decade did we read headlines like the one above from 1995? Nevertheless, a few usually reasonable voices to the left of center have either half-heartedly or whole-heartedly agreed with the current Republican effort to change Senate filibuster rules. To permit a minority to block a legitimate up-or-down vote on judicial nominees, so goes the argument, is intolerably undemocratic.

A recent L.A. Times editorial summed up the “reasonable” contention this way: “The filibuster is a reactionary instrument that goes too far in empowering a minority of senators.” (The Times didn’t stop there. It said the Senate should also “nuke the filibuster for all legislative purposes.”)

Why such a radical urging from the usually tame Times? Because eliminating the filibuster on all matters might help reduce both sides’ hypocrisy, according to its editorial board. Democratic senators who hated the tactic during the Clinton administration now love it, and Republican senators who then loved it now hate it. “Politicians' lack of consistency on fundamental matters …,” the Times philosophized, “is far more corrosive to the health of American democracy … than any number of Bush- appointed judges could ever be.”

While I hold out the slim possibility that the Times may be right and I’m wrong, I do know without any doubt that if it thinks anything is going to halt Republican progress on reinventing hypocrisy to yet-scaled heights, then it's following an altogether different party than I am. These right-to-the-right-wing boys can flip on a dime and never blush – not even for a moment. Take that moment yourself and consider, for example, how they just tried to stick Democrats with their own descriptive, but now politically radioactive, label of a “nuclear option.” They’re shameless -- shamelessness being something else they’re reinventing.

Remember that it was the mere turn of this century when you were regularly reading items like this: “Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., [said] that he and at least 13 other Republicans will block confirmation votes on every judicial nominee sent to the Senate by President Clinton in his last year in office [San Diego Union-Tribune, January 22, 2000].”

Or this, of which I have also lately reminded readers: “From virtually the beginning of Clinton's presidency, [Republicans] have blocked, stalled and shut down judicial confirmations [St. Petersburg Times, September 26, 1999].”

Or, as the Boston Globe noted this morning, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid “pointed out yesterday that Republicans have led filibusters against presidential nominees for various jobs in 20 of 30 cases, including six of the 13 who were judicial nominees.” And what’s more, “several of President Clinton's judicial appointments could not be filibustered because the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee never sent them to the floor.”

Furthermore, do you recall Democrats during Clinton’s administration racing en masse to drop the bomb on the parliamentary right to filibuster, whether on judicial nominations or any other appointment? Remember when Republican skies were falling over something as harmless as a new surgeon general, one Henry Foster? Well, “overnight efforts by Clinton and Senate Democrats to persuade … Republicans to … permit the nomination to be decided by a simple majority went for naught.” In the end, they “failed to muster 60 votes to stop a GOP filibuster [(Tampa) Tribune Wire Service, June 23 1995].” But you didn’t hear a peep about changing the rules of the game.

No, it’s no longer about hypocrisy. The GOP is too far gone for us to be frightened by that common and relatively minor malady.

What it’s about now is bullying. The Republican leadership has succeeded so well at ad hoc bullying that they’re spilling over into a more formal autocratic frame of mind – and there’s another unmentionable “f” word for what can happen anywhere if political bullies aren’t stopped.

Give Republicans the Senate rule-change and you give them another inch, another mile, another milestone on a road we do not want to travel. Compared to it, I’ll take hypocrisy any day.

Comments

[Black Dog]

The squealing repuckicans. So predictable. They always act this way. They make me sick.

[George Bassett]

The difference is King Bush and his kingdom of secrecy.

[RS]

Hehehe... "King Bush." I love you fanatics so much. Better than half the crap that passes for comedy these days...