March 3, 2010

Filibuster flip-flops

By: AF Editors

Democrats are indignant about the very idea of the filibuster. Republicans have turned the accusation around. Remember who filibustered ten of the judges President Bush wanted to appoint to the federal bench?

Kevin Drum responds that Democrats had some very good reasons to filibuster those judges. In his post, Kevin links to an op-ed he wrote for the WaPo a few years back, in which he explains how Orrin Hatch, then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had taken away many of the minority’s traditional means of blocking judicial appointments. But Kevin also had this to say about the Senate’s deference to the minority:

For better or worse, the Senate has long been dominated by rules that give minorities considerable power over the legislative and appointment process. The usual justification for this is that it forces compromise and curbs extremism.

When Democrats were in the majority, Republicans defended these traditional Senate rules and used them freely to block judges they had strong objections to. But when they became the majority party themselves, they gradually decided the rules should no longer be allowed to get in the way of unbridled majority power…

There are powerful arguments that these arcane Senate rules are fundamentally undemocratic — arguments to which I am sympathetic. But it’s harder to see any good argument for allowing the rules to be cynically changed based solely on who’s in power.

That was a good argument then and it’s a good argument now. Any takers?