DEMS' SUICIDE PLOT

[Tigermike 3,050]

DEMS' SUICIDE PLOT

John Podhoretz

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.)

The Republican plan is being called "the nuclear option," ostensibly because it will break with 46 years of tradition and alter a rule that's been in place in the Senate since 1949. But there's nothing really "nuclear" about the rule change itself, or the spate of new judges who will be confirmed in its aftermath. The only "nuclear" explosion that will occur is the response Democrats are vowing to unleash in response.

Democrats say unambiguously that they will gum up the Senate works in response. They will make it impossible for Republicans to take up legislation, to pass bills, to do much of anything.

Minority Leader Harry Reid put it very frankly back in December: "If they, for whatever reason, decide to do this, it's not only wrong, they will rue the day they did it, because we will do whatever we can do to strike back. I know procedures around here. And I know that there will still be Senate business conducted. But I will, for lack of a better word, screw things up."

This threat is just about the only card Democrats have to play against the Republican action.

But if they actually follow through, they'll do themselves and their party great injury. Even though obstructionism is a vital weapon in a party's arsenal, it only works when it goes on below the radar.

The American people don't like it when politicians announce that they're going to see to it that nothing happens. Voters don't elect senators to do nothing.

Republicans learned this lesson to their sorrow in the fall of 1995. They went into confrontation mode with President Bill Clinton by sending him budget bills they knew he wouldn't sign. When he vetoed the bills, the federal government was forced to shut down.

The GOP hoped the public would blame Clinton, since he had vetoed the bills. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said, "We want the country to understand that the only way the government will close tomorrow is that President Clinton is determined to close it." That's not the way it went down. Because the GOP had provoked the showdown, it got blamed for the shutdown.

The entire business was a political calamity for Republicans. They appeared to be acting out of pique, keeping the government closed in order to force Clinton to bow to their wishes. And Clinton went after them for it, constantly saying he wanted the government to go back to work to serve the American people.

If Reid's Democrats effectively shut down the Senate, they will open themselves up to the same criticism that the GOP received back in 1995. They too will be crosswise of a president — in this case, George W. Bush, who will be able to play the same "get back to work" card that Clinton played.

The Republican argument on behalf of the rules change is far simpler and easier to understand than the Democratic argument. Bush and the GOP will say all they've done is to allow a candidate a fair, up-or-down vote instead of all this fancy footwork designed to delay that vote indefinitely.

So go ahead, Harry Reid. Make George W. Bush's day. If Democrats go into an active and public stance of truculent obstruction, they will hand Bush a giant stick to beat them with when 33 senators — including 6 very vulnerable Democrats — face the voters in their states in 2006.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/44781.htm

[WarTim 3,457]

Poor libs, they can' help it. They were born with a silver LEG in their mouth.