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Mon. May 23, 2005

Moderate Rumblings

It’s no sure thing. It’s just a possibility. But it’s one we haven’t seen in DC since, well, perhaps forever: a small coalition of centrists and moderates may force the partisan forces of both parties to eat crow and accept their consensus solution.

There’s about a dozen Senators, those oxymoronic types sometimes known/slurred as “Liberal Republicans” and “Conservative Democrats,” who are working towards a consensus among themselves that they can force upon their peers. How? It’s a simple matter of numbers. Instead of a “55-45” Senate, it becomes a “49-39-12” Senate, in which neither partisan block gets their way. They require an alliance with the middle to get anything done.

You can imagine my personal glee. Of course, there are many who are quick to turn the garden hose on these moderate dogs before they reproduce.

I’m not sure why I’m going to comment on a columnist in the New York Times, as David Brooks and his ilk are on the web’s “imminently extinct species” list. Perhaps it was this comment that trolled me over the line: “No more sweetheart press for the responsible middle. Put up or shut up.”

Oh, that’s a rich one … “sweetheart press for the responsible middle.” You’ve had your damn three paragraphs of positive press this year, and now it’s time to get down to what we do best, slagging you from our point in the political spectrum.

But do go on:

They agreed on the basic approach. The Democrats would allow votes on a few of the blocked judicial nominees (Priscilla Owen, William Pryor and Janice Rogers Brown, I’m told). In exchange the Republicans would drop a couple of the nominees (probably Henry Saad and William Myers).

The Democrats would promise not to use the filibuster, except under extreme circumstances. The Republicans would promise not to exercise the nuclear option except under extreme circumstances.

That was the deal, and a very fair one, too. But of course these are moderates. They can’t just shove something through on the rough and dirty the way the partisans do. They can’t lock themselves in the room until they reach a deal and then march out and announce it to the press.

They have to shop it around.

Does anybody think the ultrapartisan types would be paralyzed in this way? Does anybody think the senatorial representatives of the Family Research Council (on the right) or the Alliance for Justice (on the left) would be stuck quibbling over niceties, or be terrified by what people in other wings of their party might say?

David Brooks: “The Senate’s Quavering Middle”

Is Brooks capable of that fine an irony? Or does he really believe that a group of politicians who don’t “shove something through on the rough and dirty the way the partisans do,” prefer to consult with others, and quibble over niceties … is a bad thing?

He claims “The talks stalled,” and perhaps on his stated “shove it through rough and dirty” terms, it has. But there’s no Fat Lady singing yet, just the left and right portions of the choir trying to urge her on: “As we descend down this path, the moderates are being serenaded for their valiant efforts to find a compromise. I’m all for valiant efforts, but why do the independent types always have to be so ineffectual? Why do they always have to play their accustomed role: well-intentioned roadkill?”

Here’s a hint where evidence may be found: check the tire tracks on that moderate roadkill … are they red or blue? Because if it’s moderate roadkill, the most likely suspects are their alleged party peers who feel they haven’t properly toed the party line. They rarely get to the front line because they get fragged first, shot in the back on their way forward. Could it be that moderates are “so ineffectual” because their party peers continually pull the rug out from under them?

And could this be, “turnabout, fair play”? The Washington Post hopes so:

If there is hope to avoid this train wreck, it now lies with neither party’s leadership but with a handful of senators of both parties.

The posturing of both sides is transparent. Republicans wax indignant about the abuse of qualified nominees, as if they did not abuse President Bill Clinton’s selections. Their transgressions — forcing qualified nominees to languish for years, for example — were part of an all-but-open strategy of delay and obstruction. Then-Majority Leader Trent Lott actually said on the Senate floor in 1999 that “getting more federal judges is not what I came here to do.” Now Republicans reduce President Bush’s nominees to stereotypes designed to score points: Janice Rogers Brown, a member of the California Supreme Court and a nominee for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, is a sharecropper’s daughter; Justice Owen teaches Sunday school.

The Democrats, after having proclaimed throughout the Clinton years the need for a fair process for nominees, showed no compunction about shifting gears and escalating the conflict — using not only the procedural tricks that they once denounced but making the filibuster a routine tool in an already degraded process. What’s more, they have shown no ability to distinguish between nominees genuinely worth opposing — such as Justice Brown, whose philosophy really is outside the mainstream — and conservatives, such as Justice Owen, whose records should not preclude service.

So we root essentially for both sides to lose and the Senate to win — which is what the nascent compromise would provide for.

Washington Post: “Nuclear Brinkmanship”

Obviously, I’m very biased towards a moderate solution that would thwart the nuclear war it now seems both partisan sides truly would prefer. As the Post editorial says, “The deal is not final and could easily still fall apart. It is, however, the best hope to avert a crisis.” And since it appears to me that both sides are now looking hopefully towards this crisis, it may well fall apart.

But at the very least, this should be a “shot across the bow” for partisans that there is a “sensible center” you ignore at your own peril, many of whom are very much turned off by the current partisan warfare. They may fail this time … but given partisan trends, this won’t be the last time. Just the first. Yes, your partisanship has been the catalyst of conception for something new: a moderate block.

And as Brooks points out at the end of his column, it is about to get worse: “The leaders of both parties sound like the cheerful generals at the start of World War I, who had their own happy fantasies of victory before Christmas. Neither party is prepared for the quagmire and for how the public will react.”

Brooks is right on that, but I think he misses an important point. He was talking about intellectual property, not the filibuster, but Sen. Orrin Hatch once said, “I do not favor extreme remedies — unless no moderate remedies can be found.”

Here we have a nascent moderate remedy. If the leadership of both parties in the Senate derails it in favor of their more extreme remedies, they will have made their own bed, and then crapped in it. The public will have plain evidence that the partisan forces that currently drive both parties are far more interested in “winning” than “solving.”

And they may begin to look elsewhere for their solutions, after getting a gutful of the partisan quagmire and Senatorial stagnation that will likely soon happen. Failing a moderate solution.

So, do carry on. Recent polls show that the approval rating of Congress is somewhere around 35%. If the “nuclear option” is deployed by Republicans, and Democrats respond with parliamentary quagmire that shuts down the legislative branch, that number could drop below 30%, maybe even 25%.

Reject the moderates. Shut down the Senate. And by doing so, maybe help give birth to something new that you can’t control.