But they seem like such nice guys

At Hullabaloo, Digby, whom I'd call our Tom Paine if the folks at Tom Paine weren't already channeling for Tom Paine, writes with his usual fire and dash about Republican staffers on the House Rules Committee "rewriting Democratic amendments to make them sound as if Democrats are trying to protect sexual predators."

Yeah, I know.  More Republican limbo dancing.  How low can they go?  How low can they go?

Children, Digby calls them, juvenile deliquents.  Babies.

The Republicans' excuse for what they're doing is that Democrats have said mean things about legislation the Republicans have proposed.  Republicans need to be mean, sneaky, vicious, dishonest cheats because Democrats have this nasty habit of hurting Republican feelings by telling the truth about what Republicans are up to.  The Rules Committee chairman flat out sniffled, probably wiping his runny nose on his sleeve as the tears rolled down his cheeks, "We don't like what you said about our bill." 

Digby isn't sympathetic.

Oh boo fucking hoo. The Republicans are in total control. The Democrats can sit around all day long and call them a bunch of fascist nazi bastards and it doesn't mean anything. And they still can't stop whining.

The problem is that these people don't really want to achieve anything. They are both in love with being victims and insist on being right. And they want everyone to acknowledge they are both right and victimized. What a bunch of big babies. It's not enough to win, the other side must completely capitulate --- and apologize.

While catching them in the act of throwing bricks through the school windows and spray painting "Nancy Pelosi is a s----" on the walls, to get even with the goody goody Democrats who tattled on them to the voters, Digby quotes Slate's Timothy Noah:

The fact is that the GOP doesn't have an agenda. It has impulses: to cut taxes, to increase Pentagon spending, and to mollify the Christian right wherever possible. Does it act on these impulses? Of course. But what mostly gives the party appeal to the electorate is its ability to scream and yell while seldom being granted the opportunity to ban abortion or eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission or declare war on France. It stirs things up satisfyingly, while never requiring anybody to pay the price.

I snatched this quote for my notebook right away, pocketing it for the day when I get around to writing a post on how ridiculous it is that the Republicans have the reputation as "the party of ideas."   They've had two ideas for 60 years.  Death to all enemies abroad.  Death to the New Deal at home.

But I was dismayed when I read all of Noah's column and discovered that he wasn't really criticizing the Republicans.  He was only acknowledging a few of their faults because it's a rhetorical trick he's been well schooled in.  Admit one side isn't a choir of angels to lessen the blow when you accuse the other side of being a legion of devils.

What Noah's all hot and bothered about is that the Democrats persist in defending the filibuster.

I have a problem with the "nuclear option," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's threatened alteration of Senate rules to prevent filibusters against judicial candidates. I believe it doesn't go far enough...

As Norman Ornstein has pointed out, the filibuster is fundamentally a "conservative instrument," because it's usually liberals who want the government to do things and conservatives who want it not to do things. More recently, Jonathan Cohn observed in the New Republic that the Democratic fixation on saving the filibuster is a poor substitute for selling the party's policies to a voting majority...

Noah doesn't quite fail to notice that the Democrats have already sold their ideas to a majority.  More people voted for Democratic senators in 2004 than voted for Republican ones.  The Republicans increased their majority in the Senate despite this, because little Southern States each get as many Senators as big Northeastern and West Coast states.

(They increased their majority in the House because Tom DeLay got Texas to cheat.)

Noah acknowledges this fact by quoting from a column in the New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg in which Hertzberg lays it out: 

[T]he present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. [That's because one-third of the Senate faces re-election every two years.] In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority—a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy.

The Democrats are right, the people agree, and the Republicans don't care!

They're not about to let the voice of the People stop them from doing anything.  The filubuster is one of the few means the Democrats have of actually enforcing the will of the People.

But to Noah such a defense of democracy is undemocratic and it has to stop, in the name of democracy.

It's a clever argument—the antidemocratic nature of Senate representation creates a phony Republican majority that Democrats are justified in thwarting. But the perfect is the enemy of the good. The Senate ought to be eliminated, but it's a pretty good bet that it isn't going to be. That being the case, why not reach for the low-hanging fruit? I feel confident that if the Democrats had a Senate majority, Hertzberg would agree with me that it's time to democratize the Senate as best we know how.

This is the kind of high minded wonkery that values an ideal over a practical necessity. 

The ideal being defended, though, is not really democratic processes that filibusters thwart.  The principle Noah wants Democrats to go to the wall for is the reasonableness and bipartainship of liberal pundits.

More than they care what is really going on, the liberal pundits care about appearing to be good men and good women, who by their definition are people who are open to persuasion from all sides.

They go about their business of sounding reasonable and open-minded to themselves as if the country was not being run by the likes of Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush.

They continue to write their reasonable and open-minded thumbsuckers as if the base of the Republican Party was still composed of small government, fiscally conservative libertarains instead of the Radical Reactionary Christianists, unreconstructed Southerners, white supremicists, and greedy plutocrats.

They persist in their open-minded, reasonable advocacy of appeasement and surrender as if Lincoln Chaffee, Chuck Hagel, and John McCain were in charge of the Senate

Their only politics is that of a schoolteacher lecturing a kid who has just been beat up by a bunch of bullies on the playground.  "If you play nice, they'll play nice."

Noah writes:

There's no denying that if we abolished the filibuster now, Republicans would have an easier time winning legislative victories. As things stand now, Democrats hold three more than the necessary 41 votes to block foolhardy legislation proposed by Republicans. Without the filibuster, they'd be seven votes short. The GOP agenda would become the law of the land.

But what agenda would that be? Privatizing Social Security? That's opposed by a significant proportion of the president's own party. Establishing a flat tax? Never going to happen.

Never?

Why?

Because the People are agin it?

The Republicans running the country now are pretty much the same crowd who impeached Bill Clinton even though 60 per cent of the country thought they were out of their minds for doing it!

Henry Hyde, leaving Congress not in disgrace as he should have seven years ago, but elegized as a beloved elder statesman, remembers his own part in that attempted coup with pride.  Even though the impeachment revealed him to be as egregious an adulterer as Clinton and a bigger hypocrite---"A youthful indiscretion," he called his long running affair with a younger, married woman, which he carried on when he was older than Clinton was when Monica flashed her thong.---Hyde implied in his swan song that he thinks that all that was wrong with the Impeachment was that Clinton survived it.

These people do not care about the will of the People!

They have no respect for the democratic processs or even the Republican process.  When they admit that the People aren't on their side on an issue, they dismiss the People as corrupt, stupid cattle who have been brainwashed by the liberal media and too many video games and claim that the people's failure to recognize the rightness of the Republicans is justification for the Republicans shoving what's good for them down their throats.

They don't care that most Americans don't want George W. Bush screwing with their Social Security.  They're convinced that if they keep spinning it enough ways they'll be able to fool enough of us eventually.  But even if they don't, hey, they have 55 Senators.  They control the House.  They can do whatever they want.

As Digby's post shows, they already do.

It's over a year until the next election.  The People's memories are short.  The Republicans learned an important lesson from 2004.

They can screw everything up royally and still increase their majorities.

Noah doesn't see the Republicans' government by impulse, while exhibiting all the impulse-control of two year olds, as being as big a problem as the Democrats reliance on filibusters to keep the GOP toddlers' impulses in check.

Let them throw a few temper tantrums, Noah advises.  What's the cost?

A few radical judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade, cripple the government's ability to protect the environment from industries made reckless by greed, overturn the Voting Rights' acts?

Piffle.

The mugging and eventual murder of Social Security?

So much bother.

The important thing is to be fair.

The filibuster is one of three significant obstacles to the principle of "one man, one vote" imposed by the Supreme Court on state governments but strangely absent at the federal level. The other two are the Electoral College and the representation scheme of the Senate itself, both of which grant power to the states as political entities at the expense of the national electorate. Of the three, ridding ourselves of the filibuster ought to be the easiest, because it isn't written into the Constitution. All it takes is a Senate vote on a rule change.

Good.  We can have the satisfaction of knowing what fair-minded, reasonable geeks we are as the bullies sit on our chests and pummel us bloody, consoled by the knowledge that when they finally let us up we can run to teacher and tell on them.

After which, of course, they'll feel really, really bad.

That'll show 'em.

Comments

[denisdekat]

They are not babies, they are quite adult. They ubnderstand very much the use of language, and so they keep the Democrats constantly defending themselves using the terminology of the Republicans.

I jsut got done reading a great book called "Don't think of an Elephant" which captures very well what I ahve been seeing in the world of politics. Republicans are using language in very clever ways. It is important to note that they are not childish at all, but severely determined and caculated, and as you noted, they are great at limbo dancing...

[alex]

Orwell's 1984 may be dismissed as fiction, but what I want to know is how that man could be so prescient with regard to so much else, the year notwithstanding. Looks like we've entered a new era, that of the Raw Deal. No Child Wipes Behind — in which schools ask kids to bring their own toilet paper because they need to offset the costs of government-mandated testing. The Green Fields Initiative — in which chemical companies will be allowed to resume sales of deadly things once banned for good reason. Yes, the Dems could get some good mileage from calling this stuff what it really is.

[Linkmeister]

Is there a geographic line of demarcation for Punditworld? Noah sure seems to live in a kinder, gentler world than I do. I live out here in the area of the map that is usually designated "Here Be Dragons," only I call 'em Radical Right-Wing loonies with no regard for the future of the country as a whole. They're all either Elmer Gantry or Gordon Gekko out here, and Noah doesn't get it.

[The Heretik]

So much other stuff in regard to the filibuster has come down the stink creeek, I have had a hard time keeping up with it to get around to Noah. What Noah with his one man one vote focus fails to see, what Republicans who would do away with the filibuster for short term political gain fail to recognize is that the Constitution was formulated with two goals with regard to the legislative branch. First was a desire for the will of the majority of the people to be heard in the House. Second was the desire for the voices of the minority to be heard in the Senate.

The Constitution was conceived as a clothe whole, not a set of pieces sewn together. You don't cut the sleeves when times get hot. Much more on this at Armageddon on the Potomac.

On the Republican side of this debate on the role of the filibuster, the language used is a consistent frame to distract from the ugly picture of what might be with the filibuster gone.