Sorry for being gone. Here's a fisking.

In my college days, my folks used to get the Washington Post delivered. I used to get yelled at for reading the paper before my father did, but read it anyway I did. But I was selective in my reading: the editorial page. After the Post's nauseating coverage of the '96 conventions (rapturously fulsomizing for two days over the Clinton's choice of Atlanta before the convention, relegating the Republican convention to an insert on the bottom of the front page), I determined that if I was going to read Democratic political commentary, I was going to read the stuff that was up-front about it.

Nowadays, of course, I find the Post to be perhaps the best newspaper in the country, and certainly the best left-leaning one. It regularly outshines the New York Times in fairness and accuracy. It's still a Democratic paper, and unabashed about it, but its integrity as a news organization has not, to my knowledge, been significantly compromised.

It's columnists, of course, are another story. The Post's editorial page is generally one of the fairest in the business, a roughly 60-40 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. Of the Democrats, William Raspberry is always a good, genial read, Richard Cohen is cheap and tedious, and Colbert King reminds me of an
Enlightenment-era monarch, full of a sense of his own importance, constantly reminding us by his very presence of ages long past, and in the end, he says nothing (I'm not going to bother about Anne Applebaum and Ellen Goodman, because, it pains me greatly to say, I can't remember a word they've written).

But E.J. Dionne, now there's an apparatchik worth letting loose a Fisk on. You can accept this as my statement on the judicial mess as well:

'Watch Those Guys'

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005; Page A17

No one was more relieved last night by the deal that avoided the end of Senate's right to filibuster judicial nominees than Arlen Specter.

I imagine that somehow this is intended to be relevatory, as though the known universe were unaware that Specter is a squish who'd sooner eat goat entrails than make a decision between one side or another. We're talking about a guy who, given the choice between saying "Guilty" and "Not Guilty" said "They haven't proved it," just to make sure his rear was covered.

The senior Republican senator from Pennsylvania began his political life revering John F. Kennedy and proudly declared himself a "Kennedy Democrat." The foundation of his career was the idea of checks and balances.

"Checks and balances," you say? I am intrigued. Tell me more of these plucky "checks and balances." I failed high school civics and have no idea wherefrom such a concept might have fallen.

In the late 1960s, Specter decided that party loyalty could ask too much. Despite his Democratic leanings, he accepted the Republican nomination for district attorney in Philadelphia. He was running against a Democratic machine that was, as Specter once put it, "highly suspect if not demonstrably corrupt."

Still is. Philadelphia is one of the worst-run cities on the East Coast. It makes Boston look like the New Jerusalem. The Democratic machine is as entrenched, and as powerful, now as it was then. So Specter appears to have accomplished nothing by this bold crossing of the aisle except getting his name in the papers.

Along with Tom Gola, a legendary basketball star whom the Republicans ran for city comptroller, Specter argued that the citizens of Philadelphia desperately needed the minority party to have some power to curb the abuses of the majority.

Their brilliant slogan, one of my favorites: "We need these guys to watch those guys."

Imagine what might have been if he had decided to say "We need these guys in power, so they can do what's right." This might not have been immediately possible, given the circumstances of Philly politics. But building on this momentum might have led to a growing of the party's base and an actual choice in governance, instead of the one-party kleptocracy the city is today. But Specter's wouldn't be interested in that.

There could be no better argument for preserving judicial filibusters. That's why a substantial group of Republicans led by Sen. John McCain joined with moderate Democrats last night in a compromise that will keep the right to filibuster alive.

The "right to filibuster." Oh, isn't that just what we need? Dark were the days for our most powerful legislators, until the Right to Filibuster was preserved by the brace, the few, the Specters of Truth!

Senators of the World, UNITE!!!

The "nuclear option" was a problem not only because it meant reducing the power of Senate Democrats

Heaven Forfend.

but also because it substantially reduced the ability of the Senate as a whole to challenge presidential judicial appointees. That capacity gives the Senate, currently the most middle-of-the-road of the elected branches of the federal government, the ability to exercise a moderating influence on the president's judicial choices.

All of this would be fine if I perceived the need for the President's judicial choices to be moderated, if I saw a threat they presented. I've never heard a Democrat put forward a cogent argument that detailed what was wrong with the President's picks. They've been described as "extreme," "right-wing," "theocratic" and so on. What I haven't heard is why they shouldn't be judges. Surely, in a world where "we need these guys to watch those guys," a few origonal constructionists in a judiciary full of penumbra-expanders would be a welcome, even moderating influence?


Apparently not.

The nuclear option to blow away the minority's rights promised a huge and unprecedented expansion of presidential control over the judiciary. The Republican compromisers decided that they needed to exercise some control over "those guys" in the White House. They also know they will welcome such influence when the Democrats take back the White House, as they will some day.

Did the President have "unprecedented control over the judiciary" in the days before Clinton when Senates, as a rule passed all but a few of a President's nominees? Or was the judiciary, selected by the President within a select set of parameters, and passed by the Senate provided they weren't completely imbecilic, a truly independent branch of government, as it was intended to be?


Is the establishment of a 60-vote supermajority to pass any judicial nominee not an unprecedented expansion of senatorial control over the judiciary?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other Republicans who backed the nuclear option hurt themselves badly with shameful rhetoric suggesting that murder and mayhem, not honest differences, were at the heart of this battle.

Yes, "shameful rhetoric" always costs senators votes. That's why Ted Kennedy's career in the Senate was so brief.

Thus did Frist accuse the Democrats of wanting to "kill, to defeat, to assassinate" President Bush's nominees. Oh, my. That's what comes out when a Princeton graduate plays the role of counterfeit populist in pandering to the Christian right.

And this is what comes out when a Beltway journalist can't fathom the possibility that a two-term President whose party controls Congress might nominate people whose ideas resonate with a sizable section of the public. The formula is so typical as to be cliche: speak out on the need to soak the rich = "authentic" populism. Speak out on cultural issues that play in Peoria = "counterfeit" populism.

Someone be a sport and tell E.J. that there's a thing called character assassination. If the concept confuses him, he can ask Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to elucidate on the subject.

Frist is waging this fight because he wants to be president and needs support from social conservatives.

Number of words between E.J.'s backhanded comment that there were "honest differences" on the side of the Democrats and his cynical determination that Frist is merely building up an exploratory committee: 39, including the "a's" and "the's".

That's hutzpah, my friends.

Then there was the comment from the other Republican senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. Senate debates routinely produce tortured metaphors. But in arguing that Democrats had no right to demand that Republicans follow the standard rules in changing the Senate's filibuster procedures, Santorum hit new heights of weirdness.

Here's what Santorum said: "The audacity of some members to stand up and say, 'How dare you break this rule,' that's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city. It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster."

Huh?

History lesson time: in 1940 Germany took over Paris, by invading the country. The Allies later disputed the Nazi occupation of France, and I'm assuming bombing was involved. The analogy works like this: People cannot claim legitimacy by historical tradition for something that has been recently established. Thus, the "nuclear option" was aimed at the Democratic supermajority, which, as I previously pointed out, is not part of Senate tradition.

Now, can a great big Brookings Institute fellow understand that?

Santorum later insisted that his words were "meant to dramatize the principle of an argument, not to characterize my Democratic colleagues." Gee, thanks for that.

Why, the impertinence of the thing! The next thing you know, people will start comparing the President to Hitler!

Oh, yes, and although he is not a senator, Pat Robertson certainly speaks for the constituency to which Bill Frist was pandering.

And Micheal Moore speaks for the constituency to which Harry Reid is "pandering," if "pandering" means "agree with" and "speaks for" means "belongs to roughly the same political coalition as."

Don't you love it? Two Senators out of 100, and on we are to Pat Robertson, who's said another dumb thing. This is selective quoting with a vengeance.

The deal is not perfect. There are grounds to worry that the federal judiciary will be dominated at the end of the Bush years by a certain style of conservative -- Janice Rogers Brown is representative -- ready to roll back the New Deal jurisprudence of the last 70 years. Many who buy this legal approach preach that federal rules on wages and hours, environmental and business regulation, should be overturned by courts that would use 19th-century standards to void Washington's capacity to create rational standards for a complex 21st-century economy. Stopping such a judicial takeover would justify filibusters.

Press Summary: "The deal is not perfect. It allows people who have different viewpoints to become judges. That's bad, mmkay?"

Snark aside, at least Dionne had an objection to Brown that didn't involve the a-word, and for that he should be commended. It allows the question of whether 70 years of New Deal jurisprudence has been good for anything other than keeping certain aspects of our economy mired in the 1970's to be debated. But it still sounds too much like an insistence that the judiciary be monolithic, while the political branches be partisan.

It also underlines the degree to which Democrats have become the country's real conservatives. Back when Specter was switching parties, the argument of 70 years of tradition was the last thing any self-respecting Democrat would have respected. Now, it's routinely trotted out as a weapon against any of Bush's proposals, from Social Security to ANWR. None of them seem to realize that such an argument gives off the impression that they have no other arguments to fall back on.