Checks & Balances

Dirty Harry Reid learned his Tom Daschle lessons well.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Saturday that the fight over President Bush's judicial nominees is really a battle between Democrats who believe in checks and balances and Republicans who want everything their way. [my emphasis]

Look who's talking, Senator.

"When it comes down to it, stripping away these important checks and balances is about the arrogance of those in power who want to rewrite the rules so that they can get their way," Reid, D-NV, said in his party's weekly radio address.

Senate rules are not "checks and balances." The latter are enumerated in the Constitution, which Reid and his gang are using as a propaganda shield to hide their own arrogance and frustration at being out of power in re-writing that same Constitution to get their own way.

While the fight is technically over the internal rules of the Senate, Reid said it is still important. "This isn't about some arcane procedures of the Senate. It is about protecting liberty and our limited government," he said.

Neither of which he and his party believe in, or they wouldn't be defending judicial usurpation - which is what the term "independent judiciary" has come to mean in practice.

Without the judicial filibuster, "the U.S. Senate becomes merely a rubber stamp for the president," Reid said. "It would mean that one political party - be it Republicans today or Democrats tomorrow - gets to have all the say over our nation's highest courts."

No bleep, Senator. I guess that means the U.S. Senate was a "rubber stamp" (with one exception) for its first 214 years of existence. And, unless recorded history is a drastic departure from what actually took place, the nation seems to have survived it without too much difficulty.

Here's the remainder of what can be considered my rebuttal to that Nevada dryball, posted over at GOP Bloggers last night:

[C]hecks and balances are institutional limitations, not partisan ones.

Indeed, when the founding documents were penned political parties didn't exist yet. The founders frowned upon the very concept of political parties, believing that factionalization would interfere with responsible governance that looked after the interests of all the people.

That was a rare instance in which the founders failed to take human nature into account. But the system adjusted to partisanism, as it has a great many other developments over the past two centuries.

What the Donk blockade, in defense of an unelected judgegarchy, evinces more than anything else is the Democrats' profound distrust of, and alienation from, the American people themselves. Ditto our republican (small "r") system. If they had any faith in either, they would make their case in the next electoral cycle in the hopes of regaining the majority so that they could muster the numbers to vote down judicial nominees on the floor.

However, somewhat paradoxically, it is the very lengths to which they've gone to undermine the system that have done grave damage to their ability to succeed within it. You could make the argument that if the Democrats hadn't gone Bushophobically insane over the past few years, they might have done markedly better in 2004. And, even if they had still lost to Bush, they might still have had parity or a slight majority in the Senate.

For the DisLoyal Opposition, radical obstructionism is proving to be an "in for a penny, in for a pound" proposition.

Unless - and this is the big caveat - they can intimidate the majority away from exercising its power to change the rules and break the filibuster. If that happens, on top of Republicans cutting and running from Social Security private accounts, 2006 and 2008 will be disasters, and we'll be in for an era of dishonest, messiahnistic left-wing crowing that will make the Clinton detour look like a right-wing revival.