Wave Maker

[Apologies for the excessively spare posting, folks. I have become engaged in an exhilarating project -- asisting my father with the writing of his memoirs, and it is consuming much of my creative energy.]

Over two years ago, the nation was engaged in a great political debate as the majority Republicans in the Senate openly contemplated revising their cloture rules to prevent the minority party from being able to filibuster federal judicial nominees. It was referred to ad nauseam back then as the "nuclear option," i.e., reducing the percentage of votes required to reach cloture from 60% to a majority.

In a somewhat iconoclastic post at the time I argued thus:

The majority party in Congress is certain to change (eventually), the White House will not be held by the current party forever, and all in all, things seem to work themselves out -- provided that members of Congress cooperate, and do their job.

If the Republicans exercise their "nuclear option," what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The Senate has a resilient institutional memory. "People remember." And if the body of federal case law precedent is so radically shifted to the right by these so-called radical right activist judges, then it will be the privilege of the controlling Democrats at the time to shove a bunch of radical liberals down the throats of their opponents.

Admittedly, the subject matter upon which this stalemate arose was the stalled appointment of Bush's nmominees to the federal bench -- and that alone. But it was (at least in significant part) due to the so-called "gang of fourteen" compromise that avoided the stalemate and eventually led to the appointment of John Roberts and Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

Now, of course, the "sauce for the gander" that I warned about has come to the Democrats roost, and poor Nancy Pelosi is complaining to her home town paper about those "obstructionist Republicans" in the Senate using the cloture rules to hamstring the anti-war vote, the immigration bill and other important priorities of theirs.

The difference in 2005 was the compromise agreement of the 7 Republicans and 7 Democrats. A similar compromise was not achievable with the immigration reform bill.

That is no reason for Democrats to begin contemplating Frist's "nuclear option" again.