DEMS' SUICIDE PLOT
April 19, 2005 -- DEMOCRATS in Washington may be on the verge of making a calamitous political error. What's more, they have every reason to know it — because they saw Washington's Republicans make the same terrible mistake a decade ago.
But because they are so convinced they are in the right — and because they live in an ideological bubble that deafens them in the same way that another bubble deafened House Republicans to the political consequences of their actions on Terri Schiavo — Washington's Democrats are going to go ahead and do themselves serious injury anyway.
Sometime in the coming month, Republicans in the Senate will force through a change in a Senate rule to allow candidates for judgeships to be confirmed by a simple majority vote of all 100 senators.
Votes are now being held up indefinitely via a long-established loophole, the filibuster.
For the past two years, Democrats in the Senate have used the filibuster in a new and highly controversial manner — to block consideration of appeals-court and district court nominees who would otherwise be confirmed by the full Senate. (Yes, past judicial nominees by both Republican and Democratic presidents have been held up in the Senate. But those were due to "holds," a different and even more dubious Senate maneuver by which a senator anonymously threatens to consider a filibuster.)
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