Effort To Kill Filibuster Rule Is Attempt At One

If they don’t respond well, what will follow will be the making of a new, national party. It might even be still called the Democratic Party and keep many of its leaders. But it will be a new entity because it will have rolled over and played dead.

The ‘nuclear option’ is the Democrats’ reaction to a Republican trick.

Grand Old Party senators want to get their list of hyper-conservative judges confirmed but are being potentially blocked by the Democratic plan to filibuster the appointments of the reactionary judicial candidates.

That was exactly what it did last year. The Democrats filibustered – talked on the Senate floor – until the nominations disappeared or until President George Bush started his holiday confirmations, wherein the president waited for a holiday when Congress was out of session and passed some of the judges into office sans hearings.

Bush got a couple in, then agreed not to do that again.

But what Republicans are now planning to do makes the holiday confirmations seem merely mischievous.

Now GOP operatives are seeking to outlaw filibusters.

Maybe it will just be on judge confirmations.

Doesn’t matter.

Stopping filibusters is deadly serious.

It is the only real weapon any political party in a minority has available. The Republicans have used it time and again in decades past.

If 40 senators decide to filibuster, or side with the filibuster, they effectively form a bloc that makes even the 60-vote majority powerless.

This is really just a Senate rule, worked up as a way to give even a substantial minority some power and leverage.

Since it is a simple Senate rule, it can be changed by the Senate leaders; they have 55 Senate seats.

OK, so the Republicans want to play dirty?

Well it’s their Senate.

They can do what they like.

Forgo the filibuster, go ahead.

But at least the public should realize what this can mean.

Democrats, the minority party in this instance, will be forced into a corner. Perhaps all that will be left to them will be to try to wreak havoc on the GOP.

Having lost all power, that is exactly what they should do. Otherwise, they are just taking up seats in a Senate that will do nothing with which they agree.

This is where the ‘nuclear option’ comes in.

Democrats might choose to force every matter coming before the U.S. Senate to be read, everything will be voted on, and that means everything, including breaks for lunch. This will be horrible. Exactly.

Democrats will have no substantive power, so they must use whatever power they do have to protest the Republican takeover of the Senate.

It will bring the Senate to its knees.

And in such a scenario that is exactly where it should be. For if the minority is squelched, the Senate and its majority of Senators will no longer be acting like a group of legislators serving on the behalf of the United State citizens who elected them.

No attempt to silence the minority was ever attempted when the Democrats were in the majority; not even when the Republicans used the filibuster to block civil rights legislation.

Now, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, where Republicans rule, Democrats may not even attend meetings and caucuses on upcoming legislation. The GOP locks them out and then drops the completed work on them just before a vote, so they must tackle the most complex issues at the very time the issues are returned to the debating floor for a vote.

By then, they are a done deal anyway.

What is most harmful in trying to stop the filibuster regarding judges is that this almost assures that Bush will fill the third branch of government – the judges – with his particular brand of far-right people.

Bush has the executive branch.

His minions hold both the legislative branches.

And between the two, they will fill the justices of the law with crackerjacks.

Democrats may stop none of this right now. But the Democratic Party has to put up a very public demonstration that tells Americans something is terribly wrong. That is vitally important because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the only weapon against Bush and company will be popular outrage. The ability of elected representatives in the minority to express their outrage will no longer exist.

Mr. Bush and the Republican Party is clearly striving to turn America into a one-party political system, and history shows that what will follow will be authoritarianism; i.e., dictatorship. In this case it will be a dictatorship of the far right.

3/20/05