Don't Let Me Stop You: High Noon for Judicial Nominees

At last we seem to be reaching the showdown on the "DC-12," the appellate court nominees denied a confirmation vote by filibuster. Normally, here in The Great American Desert, we escape a lot of the national, political ads. Nebraska is not just a Red State, but a Big Red State, so neither side normally feels like spending any money trying to persuade voters here.

In this case both Nebraska Senators, Hagel and Nelson, are potential swing votes and under a lot of heat. Consequently, we're seen the full complement of ads with a herd of rampaging, rogue elephants tearing down Washington, Jimmy Stewart as Mister Smith filibustering (apparently for the right to filibuster), and Bill Frist playing the role of the Emperor in a Star Wars theme ("Revenge of the Frist"). Frankly, BurgerKing did a better job with the Star Wars tie-ins. There's even an Algore speech available where he claims the Republicans are pure evil:

"They seek nothing less than absolute power. Their grand design is an all-powerful executive using a weakened legislature to fashion a compliant judiciary in its own image. They envision a total breakdown of the separation of powers. And in its place they want to establish a system in which power is unified in the service of a narrow ideology serving a narrow set of interests."

Apparently Gore missed the last few elections wherein these Republicans and their "digital brownshirts," as he said, actually won the presidency and a solid majority in both houses of Congress. Along with electoral victories goes the power to appoint judges and the power to confirm them. Calling a group of qualified, mainstream judges "extreme" doesn't make it so, and minority parties don't get a veto over presidential appointments.

It's a measure of how desperate the fringe Left is and how bare the cupboard is that Al Gore has been pressed into service for this. Next they'll be wheeling out some senile old Byrd, oh wait, they already did. We caught a little of that on CSPAN2, before dozing off.

A fight to the death over a non-existent "right" to filibuster judicial nominees seems a peculiar choice. The Left must see that they can't win this, not the least because the Republican's can't let them win and everyone knows it.

There's talk of the Democrats today being like the Republicans when Gingrich led them back to power. That overlooks the real strength of the Republican resurgence of that period: the Contract With America. There were ideas, a plan, and coherence behind Gingrich and his crew. Today the Left is bereft of ideas, or at least ideas they can openly promote.

Evidently, today's Democrats don't expect to control the Congress or the White House again anytime soon. We'd say they're right on that score.