The Washington Post begins its article on the filibuster follies today with this lede:
WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid accused President Bush Thursday of trying to “rewrite the Constitution and reinvent reality” in a drive to weaken Senate filibuster rules and install out-of-the-mainstream conservatives on the federal bench.
But the Senate’s second-ranking Republican accused Democrats of “unprecedented obstruction” that prevented confirmation votes and upended more than two centuries of tradition.
There is a term for this sort of forced plague-on-both-their-houses: false equivalence. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of restricting the right of a minority of Senators to block the nomination of judges, the fact is that the Constitution is eloquently silent about the Senate filibuster. The Senate is empowered to make its own rules, and whether it chooses to restrict filibusters, expand them, or limit them to every third Tuesday is simply not a decision that implicates the Constitution.
And on the other side of this false equation, whether or not one hopes the Democrats succeed in blocking President Bush’s nominees, it is simply a fact that the Democrats are engaging in “unprecedented obstruction.”
But Harry’s Harangue, ungrounded and rhetorically excessive as it is, is at least coherent. That’s more than can be said for the position of the Congressional Black Caucus, at least as reported by the Post (a check on the CBC web site found it inactive):
Restricting the ability of Democrats to block final votes on several of Bush’s most controversial nominees “would be particularly offensive to people of color,” members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote Majority Leader Bill Frist during the day. “All of the major legislation that today bars racial discrimination in voting, employment and housing was passed after filibusters” were broken, it said.
Go figure.
A “fact”? I doubt it.
To call it unprecedented, you forced into one of two positions.
First, you could be saying that no one has obstructed something in exactly the same manner, circumstances, etc., in the past. This is a meaningless usage, as anyone of reasonable intellect can find a distinction of _arguable_ merit between any two situations. All obstruction, under this metric, is “unprecedented” and the term becomes useless.
Second, you could be saying that no one has obstructed something in a manner that is _relevantly similar_ to this method in the past. And you know just as well as I know that _relevantly similar_ means that rhetoric and argument are going to play a role in what gets included as relevant.
“Unprecedented” is an appellation that stands for an argument; it is a claim of fact only formally.
I guess what strikes me most is that the Democrats don’t even try to pretend it’s about anything other than trying to cause as much trouble as possible for the Republicans. The qualifications of the judges seems to be irrelevant; it’s all about not letting the Republicans, voted into control of both the Presidency and the Congress by the will of the people (however much it galls the Democrats to admit that) carry out the functions of the government.
I don’t think the Democrats have any idea about the quiet groundswell of resentment against their petty, childish behavior. I think the next election is going to surprise them again.
It almost looks like Bill Clinton is trying to follow John McCain. I doubt he’ll cross party lines, but he’s as close as done so already.