It's different if you're a republican

Remember all those complaints the Democratic Minority wasn't giving the presidential nominees the "straight up or down" vote they deserved?

The comments that the president ought get the appointments he asks for?

That the Senate was supposed to advise, and the consent was pro-forma?

Now that the Republicans are in the minority, it seems things have changed. Now principles matter, and those can't be sacrificed, just to give the president what he wants. On a procedural vote, the Republicans in the Senate have stopped a federal appointment to the Dept. of the Interior.

This crap needs to change. I am not saying do away with the filibuster. I am saying the filibuster needs to be onerous again. It used to be a filibuster was an ordeal. The people who were maintaining it had to actively hold the floor.

West Wing had a moving episode about it.

Only it hasn't been that way in more than thirty years. After the filibuster of Abe Fortas the rues were changed. One, more senators were required to support the filibuster (it went from two thirds, to three fifths) and two, the filibusters were moved to only the morning sessions. By default all that's needed now is to have 41 senators who won't stop it, and hold the floor until lunch.

But even that's not required. Saying they want to filibuster is enough to bottle the legislation. Which means the filibuster is painless. Given the number of Blue-Dog Democrats, getting 41 senators to vote for cloture is hard, even when the numbers appear to be there (that's why the Republicans tried to invoke the Nuclear Option; they had a bare majority, and couldn't invoke cloture. They got around it by co-opting a bunch of Blue-Dogs, and so making pretty much impossible for the Dems to get the votes to stop it).

Reid can insist on doing it for real, but the habit is so strong, to just let the procedural filibuster happen, that it's only been done on a budget bill.

It has to stop. If the filibuster is to be kept (it's a parliamentary rule, not a constitutional requirement. The House allowed it until the 1840s) it has to be work. The people who oppose a piece of legislation need to be willing to stand up and be seen.

Lindsey Graham doesn't get it

This quotation sums up what's wrong with a lot of the pundit class, which is bad enough:

"Here's what I think happened [after Sept. 11, 2001]: the nation was rattled. The administration went on the offensive and they looked at some statutes on the book as a way I wouldn't have looked at. They were very aggressive. They were going to make sure this didn't happen again, and they tried to come up with interrogation techniques, evaluating the law in a way I disagree with their evaluation. But there is not one iota of doubt in my mind they were trying to protect the nation.

"But they made mistakes. They saw the law, many times, as a nicety that we couldn't afford.

"So, they took a very aggressive interpretation of what the law would allow, and that came back to bite us. It always does.

"But that's not a crime. What we have to understand as a nation, is the fact that we embrace the rule of law is a strength, not a weakness."

I'll remember that the next time a cop pulls me over for making a left when it's prohibited (that's the last moving violation I got. I didn't see the sign). I'll just explain that I was rattled, and needed to make the turn, and the law was a nicety I couldn't afford.

I'm sure he'll understand.

It's bad enough when the pundit-class is spouting this nonesene, but this is a Senator. This is one of the people who has a job to see to it the rule of law he sees as such a strength, is upheld. He was so enamoured of the rule of law that he helped manage the impeachment trial of Clinton.

We aren't talking something he did out of a sense of duty, after the trial he kept it going.

''It's a time for the country as a whole to understand what went on here and where we're going to go,'' Mr. Graham said. ''What are the consequences of this case? What do you do with the next Federal judge who has got wandering hands in the office and someone's got the courage to say, 'No, you shouldn't treat me that way,' and he starts hiding evidence and getting others to lie for him -- what do we do with that case?''

...for Mr. Graham, 43, one of the 1994 class of Republican revolutionaries, it was a chance to demonstrate a down-home folksiness that stood in sharp contrast to the dour scowls and legal mumbo jumbo of many of his fellow managers. He became an instant hit on the all-Monica-all-the-time cable channels.

Was the Lewinsky scandal Watergate or Peyton Place? he mused out loud. What, after all, is a high crime, he asked. ''How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means?''

So a non-perjurious lie = a major crisis. A thing to impeach a president for, and then to keep in the public eye, because of the damage that fib is supposed to have done to the fabric of the law.

But illegal wiretaps, tortures, wars on false pretenses (some of which were based on the false confessions gained from torture. i.e. lies, to the nation, on which matters of policy were determined), those are things to put behind us. Forgive and forget.

I think the real difference is, Bill Clinton was a member of the Democratic Party, and Bush was a member of the Republican Party. It's not about laws, it's about who belongs to which club.