Rational Grounds thought it through further than I ever did, and suggested that tort reform was not only being driven by corporate interests, but was entirely their creation
Teresa, you do yourself a disservice. In fact, in your original article on Common Good, you did put forward the idea that tort reform could be a wholly artificial movement:
"In the case of Common Good, the agenda being pursued can be loosely grouped under tort reform, which isn’t a reform movement at all. It’s a massive lobbying and PR campaign surreptitiously financed by business interests."
Credit where credit is due, and all. Perhaps I'm interpreting a little too strongly, but reading through the CorpReform.com site certainly leads one to that conclusion.
Simple analysis: The democrats have lost badly, indeed, they may as well stay home.
On paper, the right to filibuster exist -- but.
The deal, assuming both sides hold, requires this:
If the GOP 7 agree that "Extraordinary Circumstances" exists, they'll not vote for cloture or the nuclear option.
If the GOP 7 do not, the Dem 7 are required to vote for cloture.
Not quite. What the deal concerns is merely the status of the nominations currently in play. The 7 Democrats agreed to vote for cloture on Owen, Brown, and Pryor. The 7 Republicans agreed not to go nuclear over the continued filibuster (and thus death) of the Myers and Saad nominations.
(Re: Kip's comment, "actually, Frist just blew the doors off the deal: he's filed for clouture on Myers." - So this means that Frist literally doesn't have the power to break the deal, as he doesn't have the votes to go nuclear over these two nominations.)
The ultimate question on the filibuster hasn't been addressed, as the rhetoric about "extraordinary circumstances" is deliberately meaningless - both sides are free to interpret that as they see fit. Which means that the filibuster question returns the next time Republicans and Democrats disagree on who is an extraordinarily bad nominee.
So does kicking this can down the road constitute a win for the Democrats? I'd say yes, narrowly. While we get some bad people on the appelate courts, we've taken a lot of steam out of the Religious Right juggernaut, and dispelled some of the aura of invincibility. We live to fight another day. We'll see in the coming days and weeks how much that matters.
One last point - to those arguing that we should have stood our ground and called the nuclear bluff, I have to say I'm very dubious.
Perhaps we could have trusted a small number of moderate Republicans to vote their conscience anyway and save the filibuster. But trusting in the consciences of moderate Republicans has been a mug's game for quite a while now.
And perhaps the removal of the filibuster would have finally triggered voter antipathy to Republican overreach, and swept the Democrats into power in 2006. But honestly, people. How many times have we said or thought, "At last, here is the outrage that exposes these bastards as the corrupt predators they really are!" only to find that the voting public had already changed the channel back to Trading Spaces?
Depending on the self-interest of either moderate Republicans or the general public to all of a sudden take an enlightened turn has gotten us nowhere for a decade. We need a different strategy. For now, I'll accept this as the least bad option.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 3 |
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