Zero Sum Games...and so forth

I'm old enough to have come of political age during the Reagan years, and also having been born to an all-Republican family. So those tumultuous years on a Big-Ten campus where there were protests and sit-ins about various things such as business in South Africa, were eye-opening. I made my politics my own in my late 20's when I figured out what the party of Lincoln really stood for. All this talk of Nookular options got me thinking about how the Senate did business back in the heady days of Ronald Reagan, Bush the first and Bill Clinton. Remember the Clinton impeachment fiasco? They were talking about impeaching the President of the United States and they figured it out. Got business done and moved on.

What is so different these days? The bare knuckled politics of the religious right, the win at all costs of the neo-cons, the let them eat cake wisdom of the Grover Norquist movement, that is what is so different. They don't like the poor, minorities, workers, the middle class in general, or government. We should not mistake the reality of what is at stake while Frist licks the bottoms of the right-wing special interests for the sole purpose of setting-up his run for president.

Reid had suggested that Frist skip over Owen's nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, and instead confirm consensus nominees to two other courts.

Reid also suggested that Frist call a senator-only meeting in the Capitol's Old Senate chamber — no aides, no press, just all 100 senators — where they could hash out the controversy on their own, just as they did to work out how senators would handle
President Clinton's impeachment.

"Have all of us retire to the chamber, sit down and talk though this issue to see if there's a way we can resolve this short of this nuclear option," Reid said.

But Frist said he was ready to move forward. Reid then told Frist that Democrats would block all committee hearings from going on while the Senate debated Owen. Committees may meet while the Senate is in session only with the unanimous consent of all of the 100 senators, so a single senator can block committee meetings.

With the Owen nomination now pending, time is running out on senators who want to find a compromise and avoid a vote in the Senate to block Democrats from filibustering the White House's judicial nominees. If majority Republicans opt to change the rules to disallow filibusters of judicial nominees — a move labeled the "nuclear option" — parliamentary warfare between Democrats and Republicans could escalate and stall Bush's legislative agenda.

The nut-jobs of the right wing have figured out how important it is to get life tenure jobs for their toadies. These times are very dangerous indeed and it is unfortunate that Frist wins even should he lose this battle. For my part, I do not believe any compromise that assures confirmation of any of these people is worthwhile, not because compromise is bad but because the result sets a bad precedent.

Which brings me back to the zero-sum way Bush the second, Rove, Cheney, Frist, et al, have run Washington. That is all this is to them. They win, we lose. Compromise is a sign of weakness. My way or the highway. It is a reprehensible way of doing business made worse by the fact that they don't come to it honestly because if they did they wouldn't get anything done.

So I say Reid should hold firm--give them a taste of their own medicine and shove it forcefully up their collective ass.