Stones Cry Out

I agree. Although we'll hear a lot about how this solves nothing, and about how the weak-kneed Republican leadership failed, it appears that the potential downsides of the deal are much greater for the Democrats. Although the Republicans may have to fight the same battles again, it is more likely that the Democrats will have to go along with an up/down vote for candidates that they would have otherwise threatened the filibuster. They will look disingenuous if candidates they filibuster meet the Owen/Brown/Pryor standard.

Probably a good deal for the Republicans, unless these three somehow lose in the full Senate.

Well, for our readers who think that the authors of Stones Cry Out are a unified block on all matters, you have now found that is not true. The deal is terrible and foolishly short-sighted on the behalf of the Republicans. It will last 6 to 9 months. It will solve absolutely nothing. A minority of the Sentate still gets to hold up Senate business whenever it decides it wants to. This deal does not change that. Matt and Jim are wrong, albeit well-intentioned. Sadly, it will take months to find that out, meanwhile more time will have been wasted.

Actually, I messed up in the above comment. Rick wrote the post, not Matt. Sorry about the confusion. Also, I believe "Senate" only has one "t".

Mark

I absolutely agree that this is a smart deal for Republicans and one which I have eagerly anticipated for weeks.

It's smart for both sides, really. It extricates the Democrats from a PR morass they could not win.

But for Republicans, whose position on the nuclear option meant that, at best, they couldn't lose (without necessarily winning), there are several decided advantages.

(1) It acknowledges reality. By the time people get to the US Senate, there's one thing they all do quite well: count. Savvy senators knew that the "nuclear option" didn't have the votes.

(2) This agreement allows an up or down vote on several bottled-up judicial nominations, establishing a precedent for future nominations by the President. The Republican agenda is therefore advanced.

(3) It has a wise, pragmatic sense of history and of the future. To have exercised the nuclear option would have felt good to many Republicans for a moment. But its implications for the future and its departure from the past would have haunted Republicans for decades to come.

During this confrontation, Bob Dole and others, while advocating an up or down vote for the President's judicial nominations, also counseled restraint in doing away with 200+ years of Senate tradition. (I know, the filibuster has rarely been used in debates over judicial nominations. And I personally would like to see the filibuster in all cases go the way of the do-do bird; it has almost always been used to thwart reform or the advancement of civil rights and is therefore a lamentable custom. But the fact is that the filibuster has been an available weapon for more than two centuries.) The reason for Dole's counsel: Republicans won't always be in power. When in the minority, they might want to use the filibuster to thwart, bottle up, or provide opportunity to present a case against, the nomination of a Democratic President of a Democratic jurist to a Democratic Congress.

It's wise politics to allow your opponent some shred of dignity so that in a later day, they will reciprocate. More than that, compromising now will give a future Republican minority options for dissent.

(4) It puts the onus on the Democrats. Having agreed to a compromise that calls for up or down votes on several upcoming nominations and having done so to facilitate doing the people's business, the Democrats will appear to be obstructionists and leave themselves no choice but to acquiesce to limits on debates over nominations in the near future.

As Dean Rusk put it during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the US received a communication from Nikita Krushchev backing away from the Soviet Union's hardline stance, "We were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy blinked." The Democrats blinked. Now, they'll have to live with the consequences.

A debt of gratitude is owed by the country and Republicans to people like Mike DeWine, John McCain, and John Warner. They've played an important role in this drama.

Ok, I guess you have all changed my mind. Given the similar implications, I have changed my mind on the Missouri Compromise as well. It saved the country for a few more years, so I guess it was a good deal. It was too bad about those African-Americans that were negatively affected by it; but, hey, what's the sense of worrying about human rights when we can compromise?

Hiss and boo!

"The bar has been set and it has been set very high. Any future Bush nominee, whether Circuit or Supreme, will have to be clearly more “extreme” than Owen, Brown, and Pryor."

I just don't get this line of argument. It assumes logical consistency is important to the Dems. If this entire fiasco has shown us anything, it is that they have only one metric, and that is power. Ethics, rationality, consistency, principle and a sense of shame are only tools to be bent to their larger end. Do you really think the average person will look at the next filibustered victim and say, "wait a minute, they aren't even as conservative as..." Not a prayer. I wish I could agree with you but I don't.

HEY cousin rick just wanted to tell you i am going into the ARMY well i am going to try to get in!

this is getting funny, reading comments from both sides-waa waa waa we didn't get our way. the one time politians do their job look out for america and extremeists left and right are outraged.what would the future consequences have been had either side really gotten their way at any time in our history? checks and balances are why america has survived without becoming either a socilist state or a facist one.

By the way, thanks for linking to my post on this subject.

I have to say that I am a bit disappointed that the Republicans did not "pull the trigger." I was sort of looking forward to seeing the tactic backfire, much as the Republican strategy of wholesale blocking of judicial appointments during the Clinton administration has backfired. When the Republicans complained, the Democrats were able to turn around and say, "It was you that established this as an acceptable strategy." It was amazing to me that the Republicans would want to increase the power of the Chief Executive to force through highly partisan appointees, considering the narrowness of the margin in the last two elections. I thought that the protests of the Democrats had a definite "No, no, don't throw us in that briar patch" character.

Still, it seems that McCain was too savvy to let his party fall into the trap. He's a smart guy. The compromise benefits the Republicans in another way, too. The religious right is both the Republican Party's greatest strength and its greatest liability. They are an important voting block, but there are nearly as many people, many of them otherwise conservative, who are frightened of the influence of the religious right. Fortunately, the Republican Party is nearly the only game in town as far as the religious right is concerned, so the Republicans don't have to keep them all that happy to hang on to their votes. The best thing for the Republican Party is to make a big show of fighting the good fight on the religious right's hot-button issues, but not to win too often, as that would frighten off the secular conservatives.

The risk of the Nuclear Option to the Republican Party was that the Republican Party would lose any excuse for not packing the judiciary with the sort of extremist judges who would roll back abortion rights wholesale and intervene in cases like that of Terry Schiavo. This would frighten off the secular conservatives, and hand the next Presidential election to the Democrats--with the bonus of an increase in the power of the President to force through judicial nominees. With the compromise, the Republican's manage to get through enough religious right-friendly judges to mollify the Bible-thumpers, while still being able to blame those evil Democrats for their failure to bring in enough of them to really scare off the secular conservatives.

So I'm kind of sorry to see the Nuclear Option fail. Still, the compromise is probably the best thing for the country as a whole. While more a rules quirk than anything else, the filibuster has evolved to be an important check on the power of the President. The potential of the filibuster encourages the President to seek out judicial nominees who are at least marginally acceptable to more than a bare majority of the populace--which ultimately promotes popular confidence in the judiciary.