How Many Times Can An Elephant Be Raped?

Just when it looks like our side is finally getting it's act together, we step on our collective trunk.

In yesterday's Washington Post, Senator Rick Santorum wrote a tremendous column ripping the Democrats for their "extremism" in filibustering Bush judges:

The Democrats' judicial filibusters are extreme and an arrogation of power. Under the Constitution, the right to nominate judges belongs to the executive, not to the Senate minority leader. Yet the minority leadership has claimed a right to "veto" by filibuster any nominee who deviates from the minority's extreme, ideological litmus tests. The president can submit any nomination he likes, but he knows that even if a clear majority supports his nomination, the Democrats will "filibuster-veto" it. Further, the "advise and consent" function is in serious jeopardy if this new tactic of filibustering judges continues. The Democrats have made it all too clear that they are willing to let the Constitution's separation of powers fall by the wayside if that is what it takes to push through their agenda.

Indeed, Senate Democrats have gone so far as to threaten to shut down the Senate if they are not able to get their way. They have stood the Constitution on its head and endangered both separation of powers and checks and balances.

More troubling, the Democratic leadership has written the American people out of the Constitution's system for appointing judges. The people have only two methods for influencing the selection of federal judges: their votes for president and their votes for senator. In November they rejected the presidential candidate who vowed to impose an ideological litmus test on all judicial nominees, and they chose the one who promised to appoint men and women who would uphold the law. They voted out the Senate minority leader who devised these destructive judicial filibusters and returned a Republican Senate with an enlarged majority.

Senate Democrats, however, have opted to disrespect the people's voice and continue their audacious and constitutionally groundless claims for minority rule.

Can I get an "AMEN!"?

Then, on the Senate floor today, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) kept the ball rolling with yet another reiteration of judicial confirmation history. Here are some money graphs:

There's never been a filibuster of the supreme court or circuit court judge in the United States Senate. It's imply erroneous to suggest that there has been.

Nor is it connect to say we've been voting on all of these judges. If you take out the judges about whom there's no controversy, there's a huge issue because fully a third, a third of the President's circuit court nominees were not voted on because of this new filibuster by the Democratic minority.

I think we need to have some perspective. Who is changing the rules here? Until two years ago, all of judges got up-or-down votes. In fact, judges that couldn't even get out of Judiciary Committee without a majority were granted the privilege or courtesy of a vote on the Senate floor....

Now, all of a sudden, it's been turned around and the Democratic minority, almost to a person has said that they believe judges should be filibustered. And that the President's nominees are not going to get an up-or-down vote if they decide that they want to filibuster a particular nominee. As I said, at least a third of circuit court nominees so far have been filibustered or threatened with a filibuster and it's our understanding that that practice will continue unless we can get back to the way it's always been, the traditional role of the Senate in providing advice and consent with a majority vote of or down.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has even (belatedly) put out a video that does a modest job of making this same point.

Now we're cooking, right? A scheduled vote on the Byrd option is right around the corner, right?

Wrong, peanut-breath.

Matt Margolis posts a letter penned by Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to Senator Minority Leader "Dirty Harry" Reid in answer to Reid's obnoxious, dishonest missive to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist regarding the minority party's judicial blockade.

I've read McConnell's letter. My analysis of it follows shortly. If you wish to read it for yourself, click on the above link, as I don't consider it worth reproducing in this space. About the only thing I can say in its favor is that Frist mustered a half-decent snub of Reid by not responding directly but through his deputy.

Then said deputy had to go and produce this piece of obseqious, masochistic trash.

With all due respect to Senator McConnell, his letter can be distilled down to one word, repeated endlessly: blah, blah, blah. Reid knows what he and his caucus are doing. He knows it's unprecedented. He simply doesn't care. And he sure as heck doesn't care what Republicans think about it. All that matters to him is protecting his party's last redoubt of governing power - the Judiciary - and he'll continue do it any way he can.

McConnell can clear-cut entire forests worth of stationery for letters like this and it won't budge the Donks. He and Frist can turn their lungs inside out with verbal appeals to "work with the majority to restore the 200-year-old norms and traditions of the Senate" and it won't budge the Donks. They can offer to concede the entire rest of the Republican agenda in exchange for "working with the Majority Leader to repair our broken judicial confirmation process," and it won't budge the Donks. They can shave their heads, paint their scalps green, don pink tu-tus and dance a conga line right across the Senate floor and it won't budge the Donks.

The Democrats will maintain that filibuster until either the President withdraws his judicial nominees and replaces them with left-wing extremists, or the majority changes the rules to outlaw filibusters of judicial nominations.

There is no middle ground on this. There can be no compromise. Either we win or they win. And on that fulcrum will the fortunes of both parties turn.

And when our Senate #2 makes plaintive appeals - no, let's call it what it really is, begging - to the very man who is presently most responsible for breaking the judicial confirmation process - and by that very act reinforces the very tactic he seeks to dissuade - well, let's just say I'm not impressed.

I can only imagine how Reid and Durbin and Kennedy and Schumer must roar with laughter at their foes' near-apoplectic desperation to "reach out" to them.

Makes me wonder how long it will be before the GOP runs out of arms - and whether Senators Santorum and Kyl were just prosthetic decoys floated out to mollify the restless base.