Photo credit: Mother Jones
Say what you like
about Newt Gingrich, he is a savvy observer of DC politics. His recent email
message is titled, ominously, "The Death of the Senate." It’s difficult to argue
with his assessment, despite its pessimism [note: no link, since it arrived in an
email]:
No one should be
confused about what happened yesterday.
The Obama Democrats
killed the United States Senate as a deliberative body 226 years after the
Founding Fathers created it.
The use of a simple
majority to change the Senate rules and eliminate the filibuster on judicial
nominees and other appointments--a device that made getting 60 votes a
practical necessity--was a decisive first step toward reducing the Senate to a
body that operates by simple majority.
The Democrats have
tried to argue that they killed the filibuster only for a handful of
presidential nominees. But in fact they’ve killed a tradition that had survived
more than two centuries. There will be no principle to stand on to block
controversial appointments or legislation in the future.
This is a big deal,
and it will change the culture of the Senate profoundly. And the Obama
Democrats understood exactly what they were doing.
In 2005 as a senator,
Barack Obama himself said that “everyone in this chamber knows that if the
majority chooses to end the filibuster, if they choose to change the rules and
put an end to democratic debate, then the fighting, the bitterness, and the
gridlock will only get worse.”
The same year Senator
Joe Biden said, “We should make no mistake. This nuclear option is
ultimately an example of the arrogance of power. It is a fundamental power grab
by the majority party… We have been through these periods before in American
history but never, to the best of my knowledge, has any party been so bold as
to fundamentally attempt to change the structure of this body.”
He called it “the
single most important vote” he had cast during his three decades in the Senate.
He said “I pray God
when the Democrats take back control, we don't make the kind of naked power
grab you are doing.”
Senator Harry Reid
himself praised the filibuster at the time, lauding it as “far from a
procedural gimmick.” It is, he said, “part of the fabric of this institution we
call the Senate.”
That is what Senator
Reid and the other Obama Democrats destroyed yesterday, fully aware of the
permanent damage they were causing in order to achieve fleeting political goals.
That trade of
long-term stability for short-term gain is exactly the opposite of the wisdom
the framers of the Constitution intended for the Senate (a big part of the
reason the body exists in the first place). The Founders were worried that the
House, with its frequent election cycles and small Congressional districts,
would be shortsighted, easily impassioned, and unaccountable for the ultimate
consequences of their decisions.
The Senate was
supposed to guard against this danger, as a “temperate and respectable body of
citizens...to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves,
until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public
mind,” as Madison put it in Federalist 63. It would do so by making decisions
for the long term, he thought--“well-chosen and well-connected measures, which
have a gradual and perhaps unobserved operation.”
Until yesterday, the
filibuster was one such device--an important protection which for centuries had
been inviolable.
Harry Reid and the
Obama Democrats’ reckless decision to kill it will change the Senate forever.
