Hewitt still can't admit that he was wrong
While I generally agree with him, Hugh Hewitt's silly suggestion that John McCain is responsible for Tueday's election debacle is nuttier than an Iranian politician.
It was McCain and the "Gang of Fourteen" who got Roberts and Alito confirmed. They would not have been confirmed without the "Gang of Fourteen" compromise. To blame the failure of the Republican leadership to push through other judges on that compromise is crazy; if it hadn't been for McCain and the "Gang of 14," they all would have been filibustered to death. It was a masterful parliamentary stroke that utterly outmaneuvered the Democrats. If they had tried to filibuster after that compromise had been reached, it was the Democrats rather than the Republicans who would have been blamed by the voters when the "nuclear option" was used by the majority. At the same time, it gave up literally nothing; the option was still there to use if needed. I can't understand why so many conservatives can't see that.
Or, at this point, simply refuse to.
Hewitt and the others who denounced the "Gang of Fourteen" compromise have been proven wrong by history, but they seem not yet to have learned the lesson that you can't win a legislative battle unless you get to bring the matter in question to a vote.
Any legislative battle.
It was McCain and the "Gang of Fourteen" who got Roberts and Alito confirmed. They would not have been confirmed without the "Gang of Fourteen" compromise. To blame the failure of the Republican leadership to push through other judges on that compromise is crazy; if it hadn't been for McCain and the "Gang of 14," they all would have been filibustered to death. It was a masterful parliamentary stroke that utterly outmaneuvered the Democrats. If they had tried to filibuster after that compromise had been reached, it was the Democrats rather than the Republicans who would have been blamed by the voters when the "nuclear option" was used by the majority. At the same time, it gave up literally nothing; the option was still there to use if needed. I can't understand why so many conservatives can't see that.
Or, at this point, simply refuse to.
Hewitt and the others who denounced the "Gang of Fourteen" compromise have been proven wrong by history, but they seem not yet to have learned the lesson that you can't win a legislative battle unless you get to bring the matter in question to a vote.
Any legislative battle.
Comments
It may well have been the best that could've been done at the time, but it looked not only weak, but like a compromise largely for the sake of McCain's and Lindsey Graham's further ambitions.
I won't say McCain lost the election, but I don't think McCain has helped anyone but McCain when he's stepped in to manage conservatives.
And I would think that at this point it would be painfully obvious why resorting to the "nuclear option" would have been a bad idea, and why conservatives ought to be grateful to McCain and Graham and the rest. The Democrats are now in the majority. What if Hillary were to win in 2008, the Democrats were to retain their majority- and Hillary were to nominate some whacked-out radical from Planned Parenthood or the ACLU to the Court? There wouldn't be a thing the Republicans could do about it if the filibuster were gone!
From Hewitt's article: "But the majority is not going to return unless the new minority leadership --however it is composed-- resolves to persuade the public, and to be firm in its convictions, not concerned for the praise of the Beltway-Manhattan media machine."
For me, that's the Republican achilles heel, they simply HAVE to get the cahones to dance more aggressively with the media.
You ended with - "There wouldn't be a thing the Republicans could do about it if the filibuster were gone!"
I don't know to which Republicans you are referring. The ones on my radar wouldn't think of filibustering a presidential nominee. When I asked our Sen Lugar to vote "no" on the Ginsburg nomination, he kindly wrote back and said the people elected Clinton, and they wanted Clinton to make his choice, and the senate was only there to check qualifications.
The republicans simply take governance more seriously than the democrats do. The obstructionist methods of the other side should have been dealt with and dispensed.
The Gang of Fourteen "compromise" wasn't about consensus building- and it's all the more delicious because the Democrats were as oblivious to what was really going on as you and conservatives generally were then, and somehow apparently still are now.
What the "Gang of Fourteen" did was no compromise! It was an exercise in sheer power, a parliamentary hornswaggling that left the Democrats high and dry. It was an act of parliamentary genius that would have been worthy of Lyndon Johnson in his prime. The agreement was an absolute and unqualified victory for the Republicans, and had no downside. It was an absolute and unqualified disaster for the Democrats, for whom and had no upside. Again, I remain amazed that so few conservatives can see that, even now.
Think it through. Don't continue to relate to the deal emotionally; think through its actual consequences.The agreement meant that the Democrats not only agreed from the start to allow certain specific nominees to be voted upon, but- and here's the point- could not prevent any Bush nominee from being voted upon by use of the filibuster for purely ideological reasons. If they tried, they would stand convicted before the public as the ones who broke the agreement. If the Republicans then invoked the "nuclear option," it would have been the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who would have been to blame in the eyes of the American people.
The genius of the deal from a Republican point of view is precisely that it backed the Democrats against the wall. Either they allowed the President's nominees to be voted upon, or they filibustered them under circumstances that put them in the wrong in the eyes precisely of the public.
Where's the downside? What, pray tell, did the Republicans give up, anyway? Even the nuclear option was still there- if needed. But it didn't have to be used- and now, if it was, it would be the Democrats who would get the blame! Where's the failure to use power? How tricking the the Democrats into painting themselves into a corner in which they became utterly helpless in any sense a surrender- or even, really, a compromise?
If you want to argue that the Republican leadership in the Senate failed to press the advantage the deal gave them and
get the President's other judges voted up or down (where the objection was ideological, that is), I'll agree with you. But that was Frist's failure, not that of McCain and Graham.
There is only one sense in which Hewitt has a point. He himself, and a majority of conservatives, spent a very long time between the Eisenhower administration and 1994 without power being modeled for them by anybody they saw as "good guys". Congressional Republicans didn't hold it long enough to learn how to use it- just how to be corrupted by it. Conservatives outside Congress also have no clue as to how to use it, or even how to recognize it.
Very frankly, anybody who sees the "Gang of Fourteen" deal other than as an unqualified victory for Republicans and a disasterous defeat for Democrats doesn't recognize power when he sees it.
Now, you happen to be right about the contrast between the Ginsberg and Bork nominations, for example. Republicans don't oppose nominations for purely ideological reasons to begin with. If a liberal president appoints even an extremist like Ruth Bader Ginsberg who is qualified for the job, the Lugar response is how Republicans react. It's how the Constitution intends for things to be done.
You're also right (or Hewitt is) about Republicans learning how to use power- and recognize it. It's just that the very people who do the complaining about the "Gang of Fourteen" deal are the ones who are most lacking in that regard.
Sometimes (though this wasn't such a time) the use of power requires compromise; politics is, after all, the "art of the possible." That's why ideologes of any stripe are rarely effective in politics- and are so readily critical of those who are more effective in advancing the very agendas they themselves advocate.
Sometimes, as in the case of the "Gang of Fourteen," they don't even know the difference between winning and losing.