"Peace in Our Time"? Not Really . . . (Filibuster Compromise)



A compromise has been reached that defeats the nuclear option in exchange for up-or-down votes on three of President Bush's seven controversial nominees. This does not necessarily mean that all three nominees will be confirmed -- apparently Sen. Lindsay Graham said on MSNBC that one of the three will be voted down on a bi-partisan basis.

If this is true, and if Janice Rogers Brown (the uber-Libertarian, anti-government nominee for the D.C. Circuit) is the one of the three that will go down on a bi-partisan basis, it's a reasonable deal. Both the 5th and 11th Circuits are already dominated by conservatives, so the other two nominees are not going to fundamentally change either court.

The commentators at DailyKos have been very critical on the assumption that Reid had the votes to defeat the nuclear option and blinked -- the evidence of that is Frist's reluctance to proceed -- i.e., he knew he didn't have the votes.

But the GOP moderates in the middle didn't show their hand to either side - neither Frist nor Reid knew for sure how the vote was going to come out. Had the trigger been pulled I think that the nuclear option would have gone down, but that's a guess.

The question is not whether this deal is better than a clear defeat of the nuclear option (answer: No), but whether the deal is better than rolling the dice on the nuclear option, which, if lost, would let Bush put Owens **and** Brown **and** some other radical right-winger on the Supreme Court with 51 votes.

Maybe all this does is postpone the inevitable until Stevens or O'Connor retires, but for now it's pretty good.

There was part of me that was rooting for the nuclear option to succeed -- someday the Democratic Party will control the two political branches of government again, and if 51 Senators can do whatever they want (on grounds that 51 Senators can "interpret" the Senate rules to mean whatever they want them to mean), we could avoid future conservative filibusters against a whole host of progressive legislation -- most of which which would be as difficult to repeal as Social Security has been. For example, if it hadn't been for the filibuster, we might well have had national health insurance in the late 40's, and a real civil rights bill 10-12 years earlier.

There is also the issue of political consequences -- the Democratic Party is just strong enough to prevent the religious wing of the Republican Party from implementing the more radical elements of its social agenda. This, of course, has the perverse effect of making easier for people to vote Republican, because voters get their low taxes and tough foreign policy without having to swallow the right-wing social policies that go with it. In some respects then perhaps the best outcome for the Democratic Party would have been for the religious right to succeed with the nuclear option and remake the court system in its image -- e.g., overturning Roe v. Wade, keeping the next Terri Schiavo alive, etc.

On the other hand, living through 20 years of James Dobson's America is an awfully high price to pay for national health insurance.

I'm being overly dramatic, though -- after the Schiavo affair, the nuclear option debate makes it clear enough that the balance of power in the Republican Party has shifted to the social conservatives. The beauty of the compromise is that, having made the point about radical Republicans, the Democrats still get to keep the filibuster as a safety net.

It's not a complete win, but a win nonetheless. I'll take it.

Edited for grammer - 11:55 pm CDT

Posted: Mon - May 23, 2005 at 11:25 PM        

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