Kicking the can, and gambling, on the nuclear option.
Today 14 Senate "moderates", including McCain (R-AZ), Warner (R-VA), Snowe (R-ME), Collins (R-ME), Chaffee (R-RI), Graham (R-SC) and Dewine (R-OH) -- that is, enough Republicans to keep Frist from succeeding in implementing the "nuclear option" willy-nilly -- reached an agreement to send three of Bush's judicial nominations to an up-or-down vote in return for a promise to oppose a filibuster rules change for the duration of the 109th Congress.
Harry Reid was pretty feisty in his grandfatherly way in the post-agreement Democratic press conference. But did the Dems do the right thing in cutting the deal? The Dems' Senate perma-maverick, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, didn't share Reid's enthusiasm for the deal. Opinions across the liberal web are decidedly mixed. As usual, the devil is in the details, but whether or not liberals should be happy with this averted showdown probably won't be obvious for another 18 months.
To begin with, it's almost certain that Reid did not have the votes to defeat a motion to destroy the filibuster and wouldn't have been cutting any deals if he did have them. Even without the votes, it's unclear to me how willing Frist would have been to go through with his nuclear threat and so who really blinked here (the moderates' deal looks a lot like one Reid offered Frist a few weeks ago). It's hard to overstate how extreme a motion overturning the judicial filibuster would have been, and still may be. But the deal the moderates cut has plenty that's tough to swallow. First and foremost, the deal requires granting a floor vote on the nomination of California's Jusice Janice Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals, which will put her right in line for the Supreme Court. Brown is the sort of judge who makes Scalia and Thomas look moderate. Besides being unqualified and a hyperbolic activist (the AFL-CIO has the goods), Brown is a protege of the Consitution in Exile movement and her confirmation and subsequent rulings will go a long way toward legitimizing that movement beyond academia and within the courts. The deal is also maddening in how determinedly meaningless and temporary (not to mention unbearably precious in that quintessetally "Senate Moderate" way) it is. The moderates insinuate that so long as the "spirit and continuing commitments" of their (one and a half page) document are observed and that the filibuster isn't used except in "extraordinary circumstances" -- that's "extraordinary" as defined by Lindsay Graham, Mike Dewine and John Warner who hold all the power here -- its crucial seven Republican signataries won't support a nuclear vote in the 109th Congress. After that? Back to square one.
But it's the time diminsion that is also the deal's saving grace -- that is, it buys time for the Democrats while letting moderate Republicans back away from going nuclear. It's probably a safe bet that McCain, Chafee, Snowe, Warner, Collins, Specter, Graham and DeWine don't want to see the filibuster go, even if half of them are unwilling to actually vote against Frist and his fundie backers in nuclear showdown (unsurprisingly, James Dobson is unhappy with the deal, although hopefully liberals won't content themselves with that). So long as the moderate Republicans interpret the agreement in good faith and convince Bush not to push nominees over whom Dewine and Lieberman or Graham and Inouye would differ in interpreting as "extraordinary", then it gets the Democrats as far as the 2006 midterm. If the Democrats can gain two seats, and it looks like two seats are what's needed, in that election, then the filibuster will be safe for the rest of Bush's term.
So I think the only valid response right now is ambivolence. Whether cutting the deal was a good move for the Democrats, and for sane government in general (right now, synonymous with the Democrats), will rest on the outcome of the 2006 midterm election. The last cycle for this Senate class was 2000 when the Democratic Senate candidates won the national popular vote by 300,000 and gained a full five seats. If stable, as aggregate vote shares have tended to be over the past decade, that low vote margin of victory makes it hard to see the Dems picking up more seats, since those five were likely the lowest hanging fruit planted in the 1994 debacle. Of course it will depend on the specifics of the races, but it's not immediately clear where two more seats are going to come from (though, as an added bonus to the agreement, Ben Nelson's role in reaching the compromise will probably help protect his, the Dem's riskiest, seat, which in turn makes a net gain more likely).
The flip side is that, if the Democrats don't gain in the midterm, this deal will almost certainly be seen, rightly, as a disaster, particularly if Justice Brown wins her floor vote. There are good arguments to be made against the legistlative filibuster by liberals -- not least its historical role in tying up civil rights legislation -- but the judicial filibuster is something else. And the moderates' compromise has nothing at all to say about any of this: the rights of the ideological minority in a democracy, the red-state bias of the Senate, the permanence and unaccountability of the judiciary, the traditional advice and consent role of the Senate under fire -- all that stuff that various Dems and Repubs have been making speeches about in and outside of the Senate for the past month. Cutting this deal means that, once again, the Dems have bathed in the soft glow of vacuous "bipartisanship", but have refused to dig in, and stare down the big issues, to try to wake people up to what's going on in Right Wing Washington. Judging by recent polls, particularly after the Terri Schiavo matter, the public is feeling a sort of vague distaste with the theocrat right. But less than half the voting public is paying attention, even fewer really know what is going on, and that apathy plays to the Right's advantage. Those deal-cutting moderates, including the seven Democrats involved, just helped allow the Right to keep enjoying that advantage for another 18 months. On top of that, they handed the movement conservatives two bad and one awful judge that, in a sane world, the Democrats had every right to filibuster under the principle that they don't represent the mainstream of judicial or ideological thought in America.
The deal was a gamble, but probably a necessary one given these desperate times on the left. But in November of 2006, we'd better have something to show for it.
Harry Reid was pretty feisty in his grandfatherly way in the post-agreement Democratic press conference. But did the Dems do the right thing in cutting the deal? The Dems' Senate perma-maverick, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, didn't share Reid's enthusiasm for the deal. Opinions across the liberal web are decidedly mixed. As usual, the devil is in the details, but whether or not liberals should be happy with this averted showdown probably won't be obvious for another 18 months.
To begin with, it's almost certain that Reid did not have the votes to defeat a motion to destroy the filibuster and wouldn't have been cutting any deals if he did have them. Even without the votes, it's unclear to me how willing Frist would have been to go through with his nuclear threat and so who really blinked here (the moderates' deal looks a lot like one Reid offered Frist a few weeks ago). It's hard to overstate how extreme a motion overturning the judicial filibuster would have been, and still may be. But the deal the moderates cut has plenty that's tough to swallow. First and foremost, the deal requires granting a floor vote on the nomination of California's Jusice Janice Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals, which will put her right in line for the Supreme Court. Brown is the sort of judge who makes Scalia and Thomas look moderate. Besides being unqualified and a hyperbolic activist (the AFL-CIO has the goods), Brown is a protege of the Consitution in Exile movement and her confirmation and subsequent rulings will go a long way toward legitimizing that movement beyond academia and within the courts. The deal is also maddening in how determinedly meaningless and temporary (not to mention unbearably precious in that quintessetally "Senate Moderate" way) it is. The moderates insinuate that so long as the "spirit and continuing commitments" of their (one and a half page) document are observed and that the filibuster isn't used except in "extraordinary circumstances" -- that's "extraordinary" as defined by Lindsay Graham, Mike Dewine and John Warner who hold all the power here -- its crucial seven Republican signataries won't support a nuclear vote in the 109th Congress. After that? Back to square one.
But it's the time diminsion that is also the deal's saving grace -- that is, it buys time for the Democrats while letting moderate Republicans back away from going nuclear. It's probably a safe bet that McCain, Chafee, Snowe, Warner, Collins, Specter, Graham and DeWine don't want to see the filibuster go, even if half of them are unwilling to actually vote against Frist and his fundie backers in nuclear showdown (unsurprisingly, James Dobson is unhappy with the deal, although hopefully liberals won't content themselves with that). So long as the moderate Republicans interpret the agreement in good faith and convince Bush not to push nominees over whom Dewine and Lieberman or Graham and Inouye would differ in interpreting as "extraordinary", then it gets the Democrats as far as the 2006 midterm. If the Democrats can gain two seats, and it looks like two seats are what's needed, in that election, then the filibuster will be safe for the rest of Bush's term.
So I think the only valid response right now is ambivolence. Whether cutting the deal was a good move for the Democrats, and for sane government in general (right now, synonymous with the Democrats), will rest on the outcome of the 2006 midterm election. The last cycle for this Senate class was 2000 when the Democratic Senate candidates won the national popular vote by 300,000 and gained a full five seats. If stable, as aggregate vote shares have tended to be over the past decade, that low vote margin of victory makes it hard to see the Dems picking up more seats, since those five were likely the lowest hanging fruit planted in the 1994 debacle. Of course it will depend on the specifics of the races, but it's not immediately clear where two more seats are going to come from (though, as an added bonus to the agreement, Ben Nelson's role in reaching the compromise will probably help protect his, the Dem's riskiest, seat, which in turn makes a net gain more likely).
The flip side is that, if the Democrats don't gain in the midterm, this deal will almost certainly be seen, rightly, as a disaster, particularly if Justice Brown wins her floor vote. There are good arguments to be made against the legistlative filibuster by liberals -- not least its historical role in tying up civil rights legislation -- but the judicial filibuster is something else. And the moderates' compromise has nothing at all to say about any of this: the rights of the ideological minority in a democracy, the red-state bias of the Senate, the permanence and unaccountability of the judiciary, the traditional advice and consent role of the Senate under fire -- all that stuff that various Dems and Repubs have been making speeches about in and outside of the Senate for the past month. Cutting this deal means that, once again, the Dems have bathed in the soft glow of vacuous "bipartisanship", but have refused to dig in, and stare down the big issues, to try to wake people up to what's going on in Right Wing Washington. Judging by recent polls, particularly after the Terri Schiavo matter, the public is feeling a sort of vague distaste with the theocrat right. But less than half the voting public is paying attention, even fewer really know what is going on, and that apathy plays to the Right's advantage. Those deal-cutting moderates, including the seven Democrats involved, just helped allow the Right to keep enjoying that advantage for another 18 months. On top of that, they handed the movement conservatives two bad and one awful judge that, in a sane world, the Democrats had every right to filibuster under the principle that they don't represent the mainstream of judicial or ideological thought in America.
The deal was a gamble, but probably a necessary one given these desperate times on the left. But in November of 2006, we'd better have something to show for it.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home