Playing for Keeps. John
McCain, (R-Arizona) and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole
(R-Viagra) have both touched on something that's especially worrisome
-- freaking scary might be the better term -- about the modern GOP and
its approach to governing.
The topic immediatly at hand was the looming outbreak of nuclear combat (toe to toe with the Democrats) over the judicial filibuster:
The Senate is ''not always going to be Republican,'' former
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the 1996 GOP presidential candidate,
is reminding fellow Republicans. ''Think down the road,'' he advises .
. . ''Someday there will be a liberal Democrat president and a
liberal Democrat Congress,'' Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told MSNBC last
week. ''Do we want a bunch of liberal judges approved by the Senate of
the United States with 51 votes if Democrats are in the majority?''
But the larger issue is one I spent some time chewing back in 2003,
when it became obvious to me that the GOP is willing, even eager, to
violate what I called the "unwritten rules" of American politics -- or
even the written ones, such as, for example, the Senate rules that
allow the minority to block lifetime appointments to the federal bench:
The unwritten rules exist because both political parties
accept the possibility they may one day be in the minority, and thus
have a vested interest in preserving rights or privileges they
themselves may need to exercise.But if one of the parties has no
intention of ever losing again -- or at least, is willing to gamble on
its ability to avoid ever losing again -- then it will no longer have
an incentive to support minority rights, but will have every incentive
to try to abolish them, if possible.
But I overlooked another possibility, which is that the Republican
elites are simply be following their own blind instincts for power --
and haven't given much thought to the future consequences, one way or
the other.
In other words, Frist and DeLay and the rest of the Rove gang may
not have any kind of grand design for a GOP Thousand Year Reich, but
rather may be acting like the Easter Islander I talked about in an
earlier post -- the one who cut down the last remaining tree on the island.
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond recalled how one of his
students wondered what was going through the guy's mind as he completed
the disasterous destruction of such a vital natural resource. My guess
is that he wasn't thinking about much of anything -- except maybe what he was going to eat for lunch, or whether he was gonna get laid that night, or how much his feet hurt.
People don't usually think in grand, apocalyptic terms, even when
they're doing grand, apocalyptic things. And that's probably as true
for a redneck bug catcher from Texas and a genealogy-obsessed doctor
from Tennessee as it is for a 13th century Polynesian lumberjack.
At least I hope so, because it's not nearly as scary as thinking the
GOP high command actually does have a carefully conceived plan for
total partisan domination -- of which breaking the filibuster is only
the latest step. [Whiskey Bar]
12:08:00 PM 
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