Chain Reaction

It started with judges yesterday; now today the GOP House (you know, the supposedly sane side of the Capitol) passed what amounts to John Kerry's stem cell research plan, which President Bush has promised to veto, and (so says Business Week magazine) "Republicans seem increasingly willing to abandon Bush-style [Social Security personal] accounts and their opposition to any tax increases."

And nobody's even talking about John Bolton's UN ambassadorship floor vote yet, either.

Well does Jonathan Rothenberg observe:

[W]hy bother voting Republican if it means blocking originalist judges and raising taxes? If a Republican majority in the House and the Senate follow up a surrender to Democrats on judicial nominations with tax increases, you can mark this day as the day the Republican majority began to disintegrate.

I'll take it one step further: Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, whose cloture vote passed 81-18 today, will, I predict, be voted down tomorrow with the unanimous assistance of the Gang of Seven. Similar defeats will await Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor. The Dems will get their clean sweep of all ten of Bush's "extreme" appellate court nominees, and will have the bipartisan loin cloth to cover their dangling PR erections after the buggering finally draws to a close.

It only makes sense. Dems have spent years denouncing these three as not just "extreme" and "out of the mainstream," but the worst of the President's lot. What better way to put the exclamation point on their outrageous claims than to be able to crow that "even the Republicans recognized how fascist these three judges were, and cooperated with us in a patriotic effort to keep them out of the federal judiciary. We now call upon the President to consult with us in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation to ensure that we retain and nuture a responsible, independent judiciary that safeguards civil rights and..."

Sorry, I'm starting to make myself sick.

Again, I hope I'm wrong about this.

But then, that's what I said about a "deal" pre-empting the Byrd Option, too.

[5/25 AM UPDATE: Great minds think alike....]

[5/25 AM UPDATE II: Justice Owen was confirmed 56-43.]

UPDATE: Speaking of Bolton....

One Democrat, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, had sought to block a Senate vote on Mr. Bolton, saying she would oppose any vote until the State Department provided documents related to the nomination that the department has so far refused to hand over.

On Tuesday afternoon, however, a spokeswoman for Ms. Boxer said she had decided to lift a hold on Mr. Bolton's nomination. Ms. Boxer's spokeswoman said she would join with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware in agreeing to a Republican plan to move toward a vote on Mr. Bolton after allowing up to 40 hours of debate.

It appeared unlikely that any Senate Democrat would try to use a filibuster to block a vote, Senate Democratic officials said.

Once again, I'll believe it when I see it, and not a moment before.

[HT: Captain's Quarters]