Can We Get (Half) An "AMEN"?

Hugh Hewitt twenty minutes ago:

Senate members and staff long ago abandoned basic human decency when they decided to cover ideological opposition with attacks on character. How refreshing it would be if, say, Barbara Boxer would stand up in the Senate and say "I oppose Justice Owen because she's a center-right Republican and I'm a liberal." Fine. Boxer won the election in California. She can do whatever she wants with her vote. But to try and turn William Meyer or Janice Rogers Brown or Miguel Estrada or all the others into ogres is disgusting.

Now we see the Democrats routinely sliming excellent public servants, some of whom get confirmed after their ordeals, and others of whom are just chewed up. This is the part of the process about which people shouldn’t chill even if they like the filibuster. The MSM voices demanding "moderation" and a "return to civility," have got to track the collapse of the confirmation process which got started under Reagan. and ask how rancor can be expected to ebb as the political body count keeps going higher and higher.

Precisely. I, for one, do not think I could serve in the U.S. Senate - and not just from the fact that I'm from a state that's bluer than the Pope's balls - because I doubt I could get through an entire floor debate on one of the President's nominees without either tackling Ted Kennedy or Chuckie Schumer or "Leaky" Leahy or the Kleagle and beating them senseless (otherwise known as "pulling a Franken") or just skipping the whole sorry display other than when it was my turn to speak. I am so sick and tired of listening to the same insults, the same invective, the same lying BS hurled so cynically at good people these solons don't even know for no other reason than the basest of partisan politics.

What makes it even worse is that these nominees by rule and custom cannot even defend themselves - and Republicans, by and large, won't defend them either. Why do they let this systematic viciousness go on? Why does no Pachyderm set aside the alleged "comity" and "colleagiality" and "clubbiness" of what is more accurately labeled "the world's greatest reputational slaughterhouse" and start firing back with equal venom? Where is our Robert Welch to stand up and exclaim with righteous indigation, "Have you no decency sir?!?"

It's just that sort of squeamishness that allowed "Sailor" McCain to submarine Bill Frist the other day. If Frist had been the LBJ-style SOB that the importance of this confrontation called for - IOW, if he'd been Tom DeLay - McCain would not have been able to cajole enough waverers over to tip the balance in the Democrats' favor, because the filibuster would have been broken on the first day of this Congress, and by this time all seven Bush nominees would have been long since on the appellate bench.

Thus it is that this "deal" is simply the logical terminus of a spinelessness already long nurtured over the past decades by a party that lost its soul in the New Deal and, for all the efforts of the Barry Goldwaters, Ronald Reagans, Newt Gingriches, and George W. Bushes, still hasn't gotten it back.

I just don't understand how any true Republican, moderate or conservative, could even feign "chumminess" with such loathsome (sorry for all the barnyardisms of late, but they're definitely needed) assholes. To modify a line from another Star Trek novel, "If I became a tenth as twisted as [insert Dem Senator's name here], I would merit a whuppin'." Kind of like McCain does, along with the hill of fireants and the gauntlet of Klingon painstiks.

Unfortunately, Double-H wasn't as incisive with his proposed remedy:

What needs to happen is a bipartisan agreement, formalized in a new rule, on how all nominations should be handled - with no blue slips, no "holds," no endless delays, no last minute witnesses appearing with conjured up tales of harassment, no filibusters. Perhaps more nominees without majority support will lose - and on simple ideological grounds - but at least we can start to drain the swamp.

Sorry, Hugh, but this idea founders on its seventh and eighth words: "bipartisan agreement." The "Deal" was a "bipartisan agreement," and it's not going to be long until we see, yet again, just how tissue-thin the promises of the DisLoyal Opposition really are. Trying to get them to agree to stop smearing constitutionalist judicial nominees when that's been their bloodsport pasttime for the past twenty years is nothing but a fool's errand. Indeed, it would be an attempt to regulate senatorial speech, which might drive Senator Byrd to dig his sheets out of mothballs and burn a cross or two on the Capitol steps (or outside the White House gate, take your pick).

Enough with "deals" and "agreements" and gibbering about "minority rights" that will disappear into the ether the moment the Donks are no longer in the minority. They cannot be trusted other than to be untrustworthy. The goal should be to keep defeating them at the ballot box and then use the majority power so gained to slap them down, keep them in their place, and teach them what being in the minority is supposed to mean: powerlessness. Only by that path can being in the majority have the opposite meaning and elections truly matter.

It doesn't matter how few Democrats there are in the U.S. Senate (or House, for that matter), or how bad their manners are, if they're functionally unopposed.

And right now, all we hear from the alleged majority side is a chorus of crickets.