I suppose we should find it surprising neither that moderate Senators from both sides of the aisle managed to forge a compromise on President Bush’s current slate of judicial nominees, nor that special interest groups on both sides of the debate are decrying the deal as a sell-out.
I’ll admit to being somewhat disappointed when I first read news of the compromise; like many following this debate, I was looking forward to a big showdown. The outcome I had imagined: Frist, egged on by Dobson and the rest of the right-wing Christian nutbags, pushes for a vote to change Senate rules but can’t muster the 51 votes he needs to do it, and the whole thing blows up in their faces. Bush’s judicial nominees go down, the filibuster is preserved, and the Republicans and Christian conservatives end up looking like assholes.
Of course, that would have been a best-case scenario, and in retrospect, I’m not confident Reid and the Democrats could have gotten enough moderate Republicans to vote with them against changing the rules. That leads me to the worst-case scenario, which would have been that Frist pushes for a vote, the filibuster is banned for judicial nominations, all of Bush’s current nominees are approved by the Republican majority, and then, a few months to a year down the road, Bush makes one or more nominations to the Supreme Court and the Democrats are helpless to oppose them.
In the end (or, more likely, the middle—we’ll have to wait and see what constitutes “extreme circumstances”), we got neither of those outcomes. While it would have been great had my best-case scenario come to pass, that’s a big chance to take, given the implications of the alternative.
Since Bush’s reelection in November, I’ve been a fairly ardent supporter of the the “fight them tooth and nail” strategy, and have had little use for Democrats like Joe Lieberman who can’t seem to get to the mythical political center fast enough. Normally, I’d be all for a no-compromise approach to Bush’s nominations. However, as I’ve stated before, with the possibility of one or more Supreme Court vacancies looming, this is hardly a normal situation.
I’m not thrilled with this compromise, and it probably just delays this fight until the next round of nominations, but there’s a lot to be said for living to fight another day, especially when that other day might involve a much more critical fight.
I also take heart in the fact that James Dobson and his ilk are screaming treason and sell-out. Anything that pisses that bunch off as much as this agreement has can’t be all bad.