Will Bush Go "Nuclear" On Democrats?
By Vincent Fiore (03/21/05)
Sometime in January, 2006, you may turn on your TV and see this:
(Fade in) A white-haired, grandmotherly woman walks laboriously up to her mailbox, where upon she reaches in and pulls out the usual utility bills, and her ever-present medical bills. What’s missing from this oppressive stack of “payment due” notices is the means by which she pays them, namely her Social Security check.
Normally, our grandmother-type would have received her Social Security check--as she has for the last 15 years--like clockwork.
But thanks to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, grandmother is fighting fluffy the cat over the dinner bowl and weighing the possibility of working in McDonald’s in order to keep her heart medication coming in.
You can bet the folks at the Republican National Committee (RNC) are beating a path to the editing room, cutting and pasting press bites to make this a scenic reality come the November elections of 2006.
With these elections in mind, or so you would think, Democrats are still threatening to shut down Senate business and grind government to a halt. On the steps of the capitol on Tuesday, Reid threatened to shut down the Senate over the issue of filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominations. Exempt from Reid’s shutdown would be matters of national defense and spending needed to ensure ongoing federal operations.
For weeks, Reid has threatened to bring the senate chamber to a halt if Republicans proceed to enact a rules change that would allow a simple majority to vote up or down on 10 federal appeals court nominations who to this point have been filibustered by Senate Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who called Reid’s tactics “'irresponsible and partisan,” is confident that he has the votes among the senators to enact these rule changes.
How serious are Senate Democrats in regards to putting a “closed for business” sign on the Senate chamber doors? To hear Democratic Senator Max Baucus of Montana tell it, about as serious as a flare gun in a fireworks factory:
“If Republicans want to go down this road, they are going to be beginning a huge, partisan, cataclysmic event, the implications of which are so profound that none of us really know the answer to it. It would mean the government could not function, which, more importantly, means we could not be doing the people’s work.”
It seems that nearly the entire Democratic Party has learned nothing from successive defeats at the ballot box starting in 2000. By repeating these same obstructionist tactics that lost them the then-majority leader, Tom Daschle, in the previous election cycle, the Democratic Party leadership is once again capitulating to its radical base, and opting for a self-imposed “nuclear option” on itself.
On Wednesday, Democratic Senate leaders, led by Senator Robert Byrd, spoke before the MoveOn.org PAC in Washington, the theme of the event called “Rally for Fair Judges.”
Byrd, who is looked upon by an adoring media as “The” lyrical dean of the Senate, invigorated the nucleus of the MoveOn cadre with a call to arms: “An ill wind is blowing across this country. That wind sows the seeds of destruction. Our Constitution is under attack. We must speak out. We must kill this dangerous effort to rewrite our precious Constitution.”
The only problem here for the bard of the Senate is that it is his party of Democrats that have attacked the Constitution, and have vowed to continue to do so.
The Republicans, for their part, have dismissed the Democratic fire and brimstone label of a “nuclear option,” and have instead called possible Senate rule changes the “Constitutional option.”
As depicted in Mark Levin’s “New York Times” bestseller, “Men in Black,” the Constitution stipulates seven independent instances where Congress must at needs attain a super majority vote. Confirming a president’s judicial nominees is not one of them.
At this stage, a president’s options are few. He can exercise the option of recess appointments, which Bush has done, by appointing William Pryor to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Charles Pickering to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Or Republicans can accommodate the threat of a filibuster by actually making Senate Democrats follow through on their threat and factually conduct one. Oddly enough, no one even discusses this once-practiced option.
The only other hope Bush has is that Senate Democrats revert to the past practice of over 200 years of previous Senate’s and Constitutional law, which clearly defines the role of lawmakers as one of “advice and consent.”
When one considers just how concretely opposed Democrats have been to Bush’s federal appeals court nominees since 2001, the above thought can only be viewed as absurd.
Since 1994, Democrats, as a party and a philosophy, have suffered at the ballot box. Republicans control all three bodies of government in Washington, most state legislative bodies, and many gubernatorial seats. The consequences of this are obvious.
Knowing that their ideas cannot win at the ballot box, Democrats seek to implement them through activist judges, or law by judicial fiat. This is not new, but it is now much more pronounced in its intent, and motivated through a lens of desperation.
In the end, Democrats will honor the intent of “advice and consent,” or they will heel to the Republican majority that runs the Senate. After all, wasn’t it Senator Byrd who once said that “Congress is not obliged to be bound by the dead hand of the past” regarding filibuster rules?
It is time for Republicans to start acting like the majority party, and time for Democrats to accept that they are now the minority party. For Republicans to do any less invites a “nuclear option” of a different sort, namely at the ballot box in next year’s midterm elections.
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