The bullies win

So, was the fight really only about preserving a cherished rule?

I thought it was about keeping extremist judges like Priscilla Owen off the bench.

Judicial nominee Priscilla Owen gets the vote she's been awaiting for more than four years, the most immediate beneficiary of a deal worked out by Senate moderates to avoid a debilitating fight over filibusters.

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in New Orleans. With the threat of a filibuster by Democrats removed, she was nearly certain then to get the simple majority vote needed to give her the seat that long has eluded her, perhaps as early as Tuesday.

The agreement, crafted over the past several weeks by seven Republicans and seven Democrats, also opened the way for yes-or-no votes on two other of President Bush's judicial picks who have been in nomination limbo for more than two years — William H. Pryor Jr. for the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Janice Rogers Brown for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Which means that Bush gets every single judge he wants appointed appointed.  Two nominees are staying in "limbo," but Bush will probably give them pocket appointments as soon as he gets the chance.

And what did the Democrats get out of this "compromise?"

The agreement, which applies to Supreme Court nominees, said future judicial nominations should "only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances," with each Democratic senator holding the discretion to decide when those conditions had been met...

"In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement," Republicans said they would oppose any attempt to make changes in the application of filibuster rules. But Sen. Mike DeWine (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, said the agreement was conditional on Democrats upholding their end of the deal.

Which sounds to me as though the Republicans think the deal is that the right to filibuster will be preserved only as long as the Democrats promise never to use it.  What do you want to bet that the Republicans will never agree that any extraordinary circumstances have arrived?

But I don't just mean the Democratic Senators.  I mean all Democrats.  What good did this do us?  They might just as well have lost the fight for all the good it does.

Does anybody believe that when Bush makes his first appointment to the Supreme Court he will choose a moderate now?  Does anybody believe if the Democrats try to block that nominee Bill Frist will abide by this compromise?

Frist, who had joined with party conservatives in pressing for an end to judicial filibusters, stressed that he was not a party to the agreement. He said he hoped it would end a "miserable chapter in the history of the Senate," but said that what he called the "constitutional option" was still on the table. He said he "will monitor this agreement closely."

As far as I can tell this "compromise" lets George Bush and Bill Frist have everything they want and they don't even have to promise to play nice in the future.  The Democrats have to rely on John Warner and John McCain to get mad on their behalf the next time Frist tries to castrate them.

All we need to know is that the leader of the Democratic Centrists on this one was Jumping Joe Lieberman.

When will the word Lieberman replace Quisling in the dictionary?

Jack Shannon had it right.

...I have concluded that I am opposed to a compromise on this one.  This filibuster debate is not about rational discussion or debate or informed disagreement.  It is not about agreeing to disagree the way reasonable, thinking people often do.

It is about whether we believe that extremism is acceptable.  It is about whether it is appropriate to continue to believe that the behaviors that the majority of us have found more or less acceptable in years past are still normative.  The belief that those behaviors should continue to influence the public discourse.  That reasoned discussion and compromise that leads to consensus and shared belief is a more effective way to lead, govern and protect the interests of our great republic.

It is past time to challenge the belief that the kind of increasingly belligerent behavior exhibited these past weeks, months and years by certain of the leadership of our public institutions and organizations is not only permissible but also acceptable.

I, for one, do not think any of it is acceptable.  Nor should it be permissible.  I am not talking about free speech.  I am talking about abuse.  The tyranny of the majority...

The alternative is to continue to appease the extremists.  Appeasement never works.  A bully is a bully is a bully.  We have been afflicted with more bullies than any rational being should have to tolerate.  DeLay, Santorum, Dobson and their ilk are all bullies.  They depend on fear and intimidation.  You always reach a point with a bully where you stand up and say no more.  If you blink when that point comes you will forever regret the blink.  We all know in our hearts that that time has now come.

When he was a little kid, Joe Lieberman probably wasn't the type to stand up to bullies.  He was the type who went looking for the bullies to volunatarily give them all his lunch money and snitch on the other little kids who were thinking about standing up to the bullies.

He was the type of little weasel who didn't just want the bullies to leave him alone.  He wanted the bullies to like him.

When Lieberman stood up on the Senate floor to denounce Bill Clinton back during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he wasn't speaking as a moral man outraged at the President's bad behavior.

He was speaking as that sniveling little kid.  He was saying to the bullies in Congress, "Here's my lunch money!   Now please don't hurt me!  Go get Billy.  He's doesn't like you!"

And when he helped broker this deal he was doing the same thing.

McCain and Warner and the other Republican "centrists" aren't much better.  The compromise lets them off the hook.  They avoid having to stand up for principle at the risk of earning the wrath of the Right Wingers.

The bullies get their way and Joe Lieberman feels like he's part of the bullies' club and the media go away and the rest of us get jumped on our way home.

Comments

[blue girl]

"Republicans think the deal is that the right to filibuster will be preserved only as long as the Democrats promise never to use it."

I don't care how both sides spin this -- you are absolutely right.

Rook: http://www.rooksrant.com/

...is more optimistic.

I guess all we can do is wait and watch. But, I am so aggravated with the Democratic party. They keep calling me for money. I'm not giving anymore.

I'm thinking of jumping ship! Problem is -- where would I land?

[Lance]

Blue Girl, The Democrats didn't fail this time. They were holding firm. It was Lieberman and the other "moderates." Where you should land is with whoever challenges DeWine next year. Me, I'm going to be giving money to whichever real Democrat challenges Lieberman in a primary.

[grishaxxx]

Blue Girl - don't jump ship just yet. I wish I could find it - thought it was something Amanda passed on at Pandagon, but it's eluding me - but the legal wisdom in TX is that the 5th Circuit, for which Owens is being put forth, is pretty much fucked anyway, so letting her get by won't make that much difference in the makeup there. I think stuff like that has to be taken into account. Owens may be a malignant idiot, but letting her go is a chip, and it won't change the character of the Circuit anyway, so....
I think we are gaining more than we're losing on these three. Take heart.

[coturnix]

Check out Publius' analysis on Legal Fiction (lawandfiction.blogspot.com).

[denisdekat]

Democrats did not win a thing, they continue to loose...

It is like this Chess master I once knew (who kicked everyone's butt at chess at our local Cafe), once said to me...

I use to play this huge large man who had the worst coffee breath you can imagine. Anyhow, he use to instantly go on the attack and corner me into all sorts of humiliating retreats. For a long time I thought he would win by distracting me and ruining my concentration with a slow subtle series of the most stinkiest of soft burpy gasses I have ever smelled (slowly being released via his breath - smelled like something died down there, let me tell you). He one day said to me "you give your opponent two options, one is worse than the other". The idea was that you stay on the offensive giving the opponent the illusion that he has some control by giving him two choices. In reality, both choices are controlled by you and both choices lead either to long term or short term defeat of the opponent...

Sound familiar?

So... The Democrats loose big again...

[blue girl]

I agree with DenisDekat -- the dorky Democrats didn't win a thing. (If I can't do anything else, I'm just going to start calling them names) And the right will get the Supreme Court they want. Just watch.

The only fun thing has been watching the right rips itself apart. They are nuts.

Has anyone heard Buchanan today? He's going ballistic.

[Michael G]

And I thought I was the only one who couldn't stand that weasly little scold of a Lieberman. I agree that it appears the Dems didn't win much of anything except that with a ten vote minority they did manage to keep the filibuster rule from being changed. I think we need to see how the individual nomination votes pan out and especially to see how the expected summer Supreme Court vacancy(ies) work. It is nice to see so many of the "conservative" wing nuts frothing over this.

[Zach]

I have to say I dont agree at all. Putting aside the involvement of old Trail O' Slime Ho-Joe, Im entirely with Steve G on this one:

http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/05/dobson-threat.html

Jim Dobson is, at this moment, the SINGLE most dangerous individual to the stability of this democracy. And he is bonkers pissed about this compromise.

On those grounds alone, we came up positive on balance.

It sucks weasels to be the party out of power to do almost anything. Nothing can really soften that. Still this is the first actual hard-fought "opposition" action our small, weary little Resistance has made stick, and for that they get my thanks and the handful of quarters I can spare.

[Lance]

Zach, you have a good point, but as Dave points out over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Dobson is always hopping mad. It's his only emotion. He gets mad if a Democrat, a woman, or a smart alecky child looks at him sideways. Making him mad is so easy that it's not a selling point here.

The other thing is that the deal depends on the moderate Republicans holding the rest of their colleagues to it the first time the Democrats try to stop a nominee.

It may be the best thing we could have hoped for, but it is not a victory, only a postponement of the big fight.

[Michael]

I was inclined, at first, to think that the so-called compromise reached here was another horrible example of Dem spinelessness. On reflection, though, I have to think that Reid came out of this affair with about the best deal possible. Crucially, I think he's made it likely that we can avoid the theocratic worst in the next Supreme Court nominee.

If you look carefully at the logic of the agreement, understanding that this is centrally a power play on the part of the GOP signatories—the mavericks—then it's clear that the filibuster is, in fact, preserved for the remainder of the 109th Congress. It has to be: the only way the mavericks can get what they want, which is to force Bush to deal with them on a Supreme Court nomination, is if the threat of a Democratic filibuster remains viable—if, in other words, they keep up their end of the bargain and refuse to vote for the nuclear option. The notion being repeated, that the Dems have retained the filibuster "only if they don't use it," ignores the fact of the balance of forces. The Dems don't have to use the filibuster; so long as it remains a weapon in their arsenal the mavericks hold the whip hand, and it remains a weapon so long as the mavericks hold together and 44 + 7 = 51. Posted at length about it at the top of my blog.

[The Heretik]

No winners. Only losers. Truce, for now. A wafting of a Munich air.
Oy.

[Leah A]

I'm with Heretik; more than a wiff of "I have here a piece of paper..." cue sounds of the London Blitz.

But let us not generalize this to condemn all Democrats everywhere, please. The Senate caucus did okay; Reid remained stalwart, he was ready with a survival strategy were the Republicans to have unleashed the nuclear option. But he only had 49 votes in his pocket as of Monday, two less than he needed to thwart Cheney's iron thumb tipping Justice's scale to the hard right. Any uncommitted votes were probably among the 14 sitting in that room, moderating. It would have been problematic, politically speaking, for Reid to try and stop an attempt to find a compromise.

And I think Reid did the right thing in proclaiming victory, and then defining it with a rigorous specificity that the moderates were determined to avoid.

So this battle isn't over...for us at the grass roots as much as for the Democratic Party. I'm working on a post about the specifics of that; I have to admit it's been slow going because of those regular eruptions of blinding anger, not helped by hearing that Owens has been approved.

It's true that the fifth circuit is a lost cause, her addition to it will change little about the way it goes about it's business. (Terrible irony; this was the circuit, mostly white southern men, like Judge Tuttle and Judge Frank Johnson, who applied the logic of Brown to put the Federal courts squarely behind the desergregation of the south, at no little cost to themselves.)

Two Democrats voted for Owens, Byrd and Mary Landreau; one Repub voted against her, Chaffee, but damn if both Republicans from Maine voted for her. As Avedon said, Owens doesn't belong on a court, she belongs in jail.

And if I hear one more person pronounce Janice Brown a self-hating black...she doesn't hate herself, she's in love with herself; it's everyone else she hates - particularly unworthy blacks and the corrupt white liberals who empower their negritude, to use an unlovely word those neo-racists at The New Republic are fond of trotting out.

And then I read in the Wa Po a quote from Lindsey Graham that if any of the Democratic seven participate in a filibuster of a Supreme Court candidate, all bets are off. That's a huge revision from what Lindsey was saying Monday evening...it looks like the can hasn't been kicked very far down the street.

Hmm, I started this comment out intending to add a positive glow to the discussion, a project I clearly am not quite ready to take on. Lance, thanks for the ranting-space; now to focus on what's to be done.