Frist Wakes Up - But For How Long?

Suddenly, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist woke up this morning on the Senate floor and realized he was about to get spanked again by his Minority counterpart, Harry Reid, and belatedly jumped into the PR battle over the Democrat judicial filibuster.

Reacting to a Democratic offer in the fight over filibusters, Republican leader Bill Frist said Tuesday he isn't interested in any deal that fails to ensure Senate confirmation for all of President Bush's judicial nominees.

Um, not quite. Frist isn't interested in any deal that fails to ensure an up-or-down floor vote on all of President Bush's appellate court nominees. It just so happens that they all enjoy majority support, which is why the Democrats are obstructing them.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid had been quietly talking with Frist about confirming at least two of Bush's blocked nominees from Michigan in exchange for withdrawing a third nominee. This would have been part of a compromise that would have the GOP back away from a showdown over changing Senate rules to prevent Democrats from using the filibuster to block Bush's nominees.

The fact that Frist hadn't given a public response made it look like he was receptive to Reid's blatant swindle. That would have triggered an open revolt by the GOP base, which, yes, really does give a damn about taking the courts back from the left-wing oligarchists who have usurped them. Obviously somebody got word of this to the good doctor, and he hastily put out this fire before it could metastasize into a conflagration.

Bully for him. At least he's not completely obtuse.

But it still begs the questions of what Frist has been doing for the past three and a half months, why there are "negotiations" about what was supposed to be, based upon last year's GOP platform and the election results it helped generate, a non-negotiable issue, and, if Mitch McConnell is correct that the votes are there to break the filibuster, why the SML won't simply pull the trigger and be done with it.

The strategic situation is that the Democrats are in a potentially short-sheeted PR bed of their own making. Their entire strategy was predicated on the assumption that the Republicans could be bamboozled and/or bullied away from changing the Senate rules to declare filibusters of judicial nominations out of order. This would preserve and reward their obstructionism and set the GOP into a genuine civil war that would be highly likely to destroy their majorities in 2006.

But what the Democrats are beginning to realize is that, if Frist and the boys do the unexpected and hang tough, and even, God help us, "go constitutional" after all, the minority will have no place to go. Absent half a dozen GOP defections they don't have the raw numbers to prevail, and Dirty Harry's threat to REALLY "go nuclear" by bringing the Senate to a complete standstill in retaliation would make his party look very bad in a maximally public way that would be exceedingly difficult to spin favorably.

This "compromise" gambit, also aided and abetted by Senator Joe Biden and WaPo columnist David Broder, is designed primarily as a deception to peel off RINOs from Frist's Byrd option majority, and secondarily as a tactical retreat in order to preserve the filibuster tool for use when the next SCOTUS slot opens up - which, given the poor health of Chief Justice Rehnquist, is only a matter of time.

And this, in turn, is what keeps me nervous about the extent, if any, of Frist's strategic thinking in this dispute:

But Frist, in a rare news conference conducted on the Senate floor, said he would not accept any deal that keeps his Republican majority from confirming judicial nominees that have been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Are we going to step back from that principle? The answer to that is no," Frist said.

It's good to hear him mention the principle itself, as opposed to letting the issue be localized to just these appellate court nominees. But then comes this graf:

Frist and Reid both acknowledged that they are constantly negotiating, trying to find a solution where the Senate does not have a showdown over whether Republicans will change the parliamentary rules to ban judicial filibusters.

There is no common ground to be had here. It is the epitome, the very essence of an unbridgable impasse. Reid is not going to budge. Period. So if Senator Frist is committed to the principle he mentioned above, I again ask the question: about what is there to negotiate? What is he waiting for?

The only answers I can come up with are either (1) he doesn't have the votes or (2) he does but is afraid to actually go through with it. The former would be appalling; the latter would be a disaster. And either - or both - would be a complete and utter indictment of Bill Frist's leadership.

They say patience is a virtue. But we've been patient for four years. That's long enough.

To quote the noted scholar Larry the Cable Guy, "Git 'er done," Dr. Frist. The career you save may end up being your own.