With deals and ransoms over Senate confirmation of President Bush's judicial appointments now commanding attention on the subject, expert literal work of journalists has obscured the broader view — why the Democratic Party refuses to trust a Constitutionally assured floor vote for nominees and why the Republican Party would not insist that a filibuster be a filibuster in the first place.
Senate Democrats seized and held the initiative at the start of President Bush's first term when their opponents made clear that Tom Brokaw or, say, Dan Rather would not be forced to reserve three to five minutes of every nightly newscast explaining to viewers why Senators Patrick Leahy and Dick Durbin were reading encyclopedias and cookbooks to a chamber empty save for sleepy camera crews; all to keep a Honduran immigrant, a brilliant black woman and other prizes of American heritage off the federal bench. As long as the filibuster's political value remained within Washington's calculus, the only strategies on which Senate Republicans could embark — or about which they could publicly and tactlessly ruminate, as has actually happened since the Democratic obstructions first went up — would consist of dignified retreats. It was "unprecedented" for the Senate to supplant a Constitutional obligation with a rule of order four years ago; let go through two elections and two Republican majorities, the Grand Old Party's reasonably organized Senatorial cry for justice and restitution, while right-headed, comes off as laughable.
Floating around news and commentary is the whisper that Republicans have always valued — and might always value — their own future minority use of a filibuster more than the judicial appointments of a sitting president. Double-term or not, figures the senator who has sat in Russell, Dirksen or Hart for more than a decade or two, that's only eight years and fortunes will change over the course of my career. Well, now, there is prudence and then there is contrivance. Provincialism is representation's second edge but a party, a cause and a president are especially poorly served by the legislator who settles in Washington. For both the cunning and the cautious, it's more practical to follow the Senate calendar. Why risk for one man's four years when eighteen or twenty-four of your own can be had by acceding to convention?
You'd be one of a selfless few to risk. So good legalists are kept from arbitration while an anchored political class piles semantics on semantics, Senate Republicans admitting to Democrats they wouldn't mind trying the same thing when, plus c'est la meme, their turn comes. The political effect, absent any sensibly aggressive push by the White House, will remain local; nationally, Senate dithering and now these deals make Republicans look as though they'll pay interest to get their loan back. Though the Bush administration can be criticized for not giving its Senate majority reason enough to discard an ace when most Republicans want to stay for a long, long game, so can the Constitution. Ensuring that Congressional tenure be measured in accomplishment and not longevity is an onerous matter, not only because simple procedural rules are apparently more than can be expected of Senate Republicans but that, too, the bipartisan noblesse would have to sweep itself out.