May 5, 2005
By Maggie Gallagher
Democratic leaders have traveled a long way from Harry "Give 'em Hell" Truman to Harry "Shut 'em Down" Reid. Now it's showdown time in Washington, D.C., on judicial filibusters.
Last month, Sen. Harry Reid stood on the steps of the Capitol and publicly released a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., warning the GOP of the "likely effect" of the proposed rule change: "The majority should not expect to receive cooperation from the minority in the conduct of Senate business." Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., stood on the same steps with Shut 'em down Harry and made clear how serious the threat was (according to MSNBC.com): "If Republicans want to go down this road, they are going to be beginning a huge, partisan, cataclysmic event, the implications of which are so profound that none of us really know the answer to it. It would mean the government could not function, which, more importantly, means we could not be doing the people's work," the Senate Democrat intoned.
Sen. Harry, clearly high on something -- God or life or the smell of blood -- actually went so far (according to The Hill) as to compare the Republicans to other "presidents and parties" that have grown "drunk with power." Like who? Like Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, that's who! Take that, GOP!
Sen. Harry's powers of political analogy were an improvement on that of other senior Democrats, namely Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., who gave a speech on the Senate floor two weeks earlier in which he compared the GOP effort to end judicial filibusters to Hitler's manipulations of the law. That provoked a response from Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-defamation League (and no GOP partisan): "It is hideous, outrageous, and offensive for Sen. Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party."
(Less well-reported was Sen. Byrd's other bizarre historical allusion to the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, telling The Hill reporter: "Freedom of speech in the Senate is about to be assassinated.")
Hideous, outrageous and offensive political rhetoric aside, will the Democrats follow through on Sen. Harry Reid's promise to shut down the Senate if Republicans change the rules to make it easier to bring judicial nominations to the floor for a vote?
It is hard to imagine.
In the first place, the American people just don't seem to be with Shut 'em Down Harry on this one. A poll of 800 registered voters conducted March 6 through 9 by GOP pollster Whit Ayre found that 82 percent of Americans agree that well-qualified judges deserve "an up or down vote on the floor of the Senate"; 67 percent are eager to take politics out of the courts and out of the confirmation process. Eighty-five percent oppose taking the words "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance, and 97 percent disagree with the position (unlike the current court) that child pornography is ever a form of free speech. (This is no doubt why these two issues are featured in ads run by activist groups opposing judicial filibusters. You can view the ads on www.judicialnetwork.org)
But the Dems' problem here is even more basic than that. "Do they really want to go back to their states and say, "Yeah, I know you're not getting the road funding that you wanted, and it's all because of a judge?'" one GOP Senate aide told the New Republic.
The trouble with nuclear deterrence is this: If you need to use it, you've already lost.
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