In a Washington Post op-ed (pitiably titled "For the good of the country, stop your nakedly partisan obstruction), Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid protests that "Republicans should not insult the American people’s intelligence by pretending there is historical precedent for what they are about to do. There is not." Of course there isn't. As constitutional historian Timothy Huebner observes in an inevitably concurring NY Times op-ed, "in cases when [Supreme Court] vacancies have arisen during election years, the weight of history is clearly on the side of the president naming a successor and the Senate acting on that nomination."
All of which means, to today's courageous constitutional conservatives, not a blithering thing. History, tradition, respect for precedent — the very foundations of authentic conservatism — are but playful conveniences and cynical tropes to the modern "conservative" party. It is perhaps of some comfort that we are are scarcely caught unawares by GOP's latest act of Making Shit Up As It Goes.
We are indeed accustomed, are we not? Harry Reid laments, as many of us do, this latest Republican insult to the American people's intelligence. But let us look at this proverbially, which is to say, on the bright side. This most recent Republican insult to national intelligence is the closest whatnot they have to history, tradition, and respect for precedent — their unique history, their twisted tradition, and their odd respect for precedent. For years upon years they've insulted intelligence by insisting that ever-lower federal taxes result in ever-higher government revenue; that hard science is somehow a gory conspiracy to gut corporate profits; that ugly Big Brother is in a beautifully beastly way OK in the bedroom and women's health clinics; that background-checking a terrorist for an AK-47 purchase is tantamount to confiscating your .22 pistol; that, neoconservatively speaking, the World Behaves According to Derp — one could go on by getting down with many other Republican precedents, but then one would throw up.
"We the People," it is said by some, should rise in collective indignation and say Enough is enough. A funny thing has happened on the way to Bedlam, though — and it's been happening for decades. They the People did rise, and more than once they returned a courageous constitutional conservative Congress; that is, a majority assemblage of imbeciles. For there is no undifferentiated "We the People" of working-class consciousness and intelligent solidarity. It's a myth that there is, and it's one regrettably shared by both ideological conservatives and idealistic progressives.
To incite the masses onward is to incite an unthinking yet knowable mob — that mutual other half of We the People. Contemporary conservatives are either too dense to know their intelligence is being insulted or they simply don't care that they're being manipulated. No matter; in their minds they are the People, taking their (the) country back by any underhanded means necessary. On the other hand, many progressives are awash in a virtuous wet dream in which they'll mobilize the People on behalf of all the People — roughly half of whom are implacably hostile to any such mobilization. Mass, idealistic overreaching is an organizational recipe for exhaustion and, ultimately, despair. But again, no matter; idealists are oblivious to what populist history has taught us.
So my dear Sen. Reid, when you write of insults and the American people's intelligence, please be more specific. About half of us Americans enjoy being insulted, and the other half are swimming in the delusion that they're way more than half — or at least in the delusion that size doesn't matter, when size has never been so essential to an orgasmic climax.