Hypocrisy and Bullshit

Your favorite, Joe Conason has a few thoughts on the "nuclear option" as well.

Now that they control both the White House and the Senate, they seem determined to enforce a majoritarian absolutism they would have deplored a few years ago -- when they were in the minority. Suddenly, the White House and the Senate Republican leadership are insisting that the highest principle is presidential prerogative and a nominee's "right" to an "up or down" vote. Justifying this position has required them to engage in repeated deception about the history of the filibuster, their own voting records, their treatment of judicial and executive nominations by previous presidents, and the very concept of majority rule.

What is truly at issue for Republicans in these debates is not constitutional principle but absolute power -- and their continuing drive for total domination is itself offensive to the most basic constitutional principles and the intentions of America's Founders.

The simple truth is that Republicans not only have not hesitated to use the filibuster against Democratic nominees but were the first to mount a filibuster against a judicial nominee to the Supreme Court, when they filibustered President Johnson's elevation of Abe Fortas to chief justice as a replacement for the retiring Earl Warren.
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Flash forward to the presidency of Bill Clinton, when Senate Republicans often used every technique at their disposal, including the filibuster, to deny an up-or-down vote to both judicial and executive nominees. They felt no particular obligation to uphold Clinton's right to his own nominees.

And now, as Senate majority leader, Bill Frist is running around the country, sucking up to religious extremists and pretending that he has never supported a judicial filibuster. But in fact Frist, and a host of other Republicans, including Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., voted to filibuster the U.S. District Court nomination of Richard Paez. (During the floor debate over the nuclear option, listen for stentorian addresses by GOP Sens. Bunning, Craig, DeWine, Enzi, Inhofe and Shelby -- all of whom voted to filibuster Paez.)

A number of Republican senators also voted to filibuster Clinton nominee Marsha Berzon. And many more voted to indefinitely postpone the Paez and Berzon nominations -- which had precisely the same effect -- after the filibusters failed.
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Republicans will reply that the filibuster is a legitimate tool in deliberations over executive nominees, but not judges. They will insist that Democratic obstruction of the current president's judicial choices is "tyranny of the minority" that democracy shouldn't countenance.

Those arguments, however, ignore two of the most salient facts about our system. First, federal judges are appointed for life. They should be subject to much more searching scrutiny than temporary appointments to the executive branch. In choosing judges the president should consult with senators of both parties and seek consensus rather than conflict whenever possible. It is quite clear that Bush is seeking to pack the courts with extremists such as Priscilla Owen, whose judicial activism offended his own counsel and now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Second, the Senate is not apportioned according to population and, in the absence of preventive instruments such as the filibuster, can easily enforce a true tyranny of the minority. At this point, the 26 senators from the nation's smallest states could enforce their will in the Senate with 52 votes, even though they represent less than 20 percent of the nation's population. The 44 Democratic senators represent several million more Americans than their 55 Republican colleagues. And in the 2004 elections, Democratic Senate candidates received about 3 million more total votes than Republican Senate candidates -- even though Republicans expanded their majority in the Senate itself.

The struggle against the "nuclear option" is a fight over democratic and constitutional issues, but not in the sense claimed by Frist and Bush. The nuclear option is the latest maneuver by a party seeking absolute, permanent, unchallengeable power -- and doing so in the interest of a political-religious faction. Such a partisan juggernaut is not what the Founders intended. It is instead exactly what they warned us against, if we hoped to preserve their legacy of liberty.

I know, that's practically the whole article, but you had to read it. I was afraid you wouldn't click through.