More on the Judges and Those Senate Dems

I like that the word on the street in DC is that the White House is even more unhappy than “our” side. And I see that MoveOn.org is crowing about the victory, but that still doesn’t do it for me. See, this way mell have been a big victory for the Senate Democrats. For once they may have outmanoevered Bill Frist and his merry men.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s a victory for the American people. I would have been, and the American people should have been, perfectly happy if the Senate had been shut down for months due to a standoff over this filibuster. Nothing good was going to come out of this Congress. It would have been fabulous to frustrate the otherwise uninterrupted flow of the Chamber of Commerce’s agenda to raid Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and every other successful social program we have.

To me what happened here is that when push came to shove, the Senate Democrats developed a spine and went to the mat for what really matters to them: Senatorial privilege–the right to the filibuster. They did not go to the mat for what really matters to me, who is on the federal bench.

What’s more, it isn’t even clear that the Democrats even won a meaningful right with their pyrrhic victory. If Priscilla and Janice aren’t “extraordinary circumstances,” in which you can justify the use of the filibuster, who is?

Is that the standard now?

“We’ll filibuster as soon as we find someone nuttier than Janice Brown?”

In the final analysis, it was more important to them to preserve the appearance of preserving the filibuster, than it was to keep these complete wacko outliers from deciding whether children raped by their fathers will be able to get an abortion.