Superheroes of the Center, Surrounded

That little band of embattled moderates I wished for does exist in the Senate. About a dozen rank-and-file senators, including Republicans John McCain (AZ), Lincoln Chafee (RI), Olympia Snowe (ME), John Warner (VA), Arlen Specter (PA), Mike DeWine (OH), and Democrats Joe Lieberman (CT), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), and Mark Pryor (Arkansas), have been fighting to define a compromise that would horse-trade confirmation of some of President Bush's contested judicial nominees for defeat of others, without a drastic rule change. So far, no go. I suspect the problem is that the Republicans -- and especially Frist, who's running for President and is trying to score points with the base -- want to knock out the filibuster now, in order to have a free hand with Supreme Court nominations.

To be fair, now that I've cooled down, a judicial activist is in the eye of the beholder, and conservatives feel they're just righting a long and dangerous tilt toward liberal activism. But show me, if you can (and maybe you can), a time when Democrats in power actually twisted the rules in mid-game to pack federal courts with their guys, riding roughshod over minority advice and consent. (FDR tried it and got bitch-slapped.) I suppose the defeat of Robert Bork was the watershed. His nomination went down over ideology, not qualifications, and it's been payback ever since. But was that a legitimate, if ill-advised, exercise of majority power? Did the Democrats merely use our institutions to their own ends, which conservatives despise, or did they cross a line and abuse them? There are two intersecting issues here: an ideological grudge match and, deeper down, a fight over the protection of the institutions that protect us. Believe it or not, ideology is ultimately more superficial and ephemeral than the structural integrity of the arrangements that allow different ideologies to compete but none to usurp and tyrannize. On this deeper issue, the Republicans are dead wrong.

- amba

Comments

[Funky Dung]

Arlen Specter a superhero? God help us. I anxiously await the day he leaves office.