The filibuster issue—more symbolic than real

Here’s something I sent to a small e-mail discussion group earlier this week:

I don’t know why exactly, but I just haven’t got as fired up about this filibuster issue as many other people have been. Maybe it seems too redolent of previous incidents in which Republicans/conservatives, after decades of passivity on some issue, suddenly seemed to come to life, but then put all their eggs in one, procedural basket rather than addressing the substantive issue.

I know what it is. It’s that it seems like a replay of the unsuccessful three-decades-old crusade to “elect a Republican president” so that he can “nominate conservative judges.” Ok, so we’ve elected another Republican president, and he’s nominated some putatively conservative judges, and now their confirmation has been blocked, but I just don’t think this is where the main battle lies. The main battle is in STOPPING THE COURTS FROM DOING WHAT THEY’RE ALREADY DOING, not in pursuing gradual changes in personnel in the hope that somehow over time that will reverse the whole direction of the federal judiciary. I want an uprising of the Congress and the people against the courts, NOW! I want judges who base U.S. constitutional decisions on foreign laws to be threatened with impeachment, NOW!

I just don’t care that much about little procedural changes in the Senate. It’s like the Contract with America. It was worthy, as far as it went, but it was mostly procedural. It was NOT a conservative platform at all. I’m not gonna get all excited about these Republican simulacra of conservatism.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Thomas Sowell is among those who thinks the Republican Senate compromise is nothing short of catastrophic. He says a once-in-a-generation opportunity was lost:

“That opportunity is—or was—to set in concrete both the Senate’s right to vote on judicial nominees and the American people’s right to govern themselves, instead of being ruled by judges who increasingly take decisions out of the hands of elected officials and impose their own personal policy preferences.”

But it seems to me that this wildly overstates what the rules change would have accomplished. It only would have gotten rid of a single obstructionist practice that the Senate Democrats have been pursuing for the last four years to prevent certain conservative judges from coming to a floor vote. It doesn’t mean that the conservative judges in question would actually be conservative; and it doesn’t address any of the specific wrongful decisions that the courts have been making for decades, including the decisions in which judges have usurped the function and power of legislators. Sowell seems to imagine that it would. He has fallen for the notion that a mere procedural change that helps get a few more supposedly conservative judges on the federal courts is tantamount to a substantive reversal of the whole tenor of federal courts during the last fifty or seventy years, when in fact nothing of the kind could have resulted from Republican victory on this filibuster issue.

This is classic Republican/conservative delusion. The Republicans are not only unable to keep their eyes on the ball, they’re unable to get their eyes on the ball in the first place. They are never actually in the game that they say or imagine that they’re in, the game of conservatism vs. liberalism. As though they were in Plato’s Cave, they pursue symbols and images and shadows of a conservative politics, not the real thing. We should call them Plato’s Republicans.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 26, 2005 10:24 AM | Send