Just two words

How to see through hypocrisy

Sunday, December 15, 2013

LET THE court-packing begin. Now that this administration and its accomplices in the U.S. Senate have changed the rules, there’s nothing to stop a bare majority of that body from rushing the president’s picks onto much of the federal bench, or into many another high office he wants to fill with ideological soul mates.

Remember when the Senate used to be called the world’s greatest deliberative body? Well, forget it. With the filibuster gone, so is deliberation. Extended debate on most nominees is now a luxury of the storied past. The majority rules-with an iron hand. And if the Republican minority dares complain, those in the majority, at least for now, have a simple enough response.To adapt a line from the late great Ring Lardner: “Shut up,” they explain.

R.I.P., Filibuster. Jimmy Stewart, who portrayed a fighting senator in a classic 1939 movie (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), couldn’t get away with that stunt now. Much too heroic, much too dramatic, much too principled. Principles just get in the way of Harry Reid & Co., and when they do, they just change the law, or rather the Senate rules. Hesto presto, the minority’s right to extend debate disappears.

LAST WEEK Arkansas’ own Mark Pryor, who had voted to keep the filibuster for old times’ and principle’s sake, voted to confirm a favorite of the president’s to an influential federal appellate court. Doubtless there will be more such plum appointments to come. The floodgates have been opened, and the only qualification that may count now is ideological conformity. Not the quality of the nominee’s jurisprudence or any other such high-minded consideration, but his or her ability to toe the party line.

Now that it takes only a majority in the Senate to confirm a president’s appointee to most offices, you can bet there’ll never be a shortage of his admirers for a president to pick from. Any president. Of any party. If there’s ever a Republican majority in the Senate, it will no doubt return this favor-with interest. And proceed to push its own ideologues into office with at least equal fervor and now much greater ease. Bad examples are contagious.

The filibuster was a safeguard against what the founding fathers called “the tyranny of the majority.” But now it has been all but wiped out in a moment of partisan fury-“the nuclear option,” its repeal was called, and with good cause. With the Senate’s power to advise and consent largely neutered, the field is open for a host of purely partisan appointees to federal offices. And there’ll be plenty of them available for plenty of offices.

The filibuster was “a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod” over the minority, to quote one esteemed, indeed overly esteemed, journal-the New York Times. But that was back in 2005, when it was Republicans who were complaining about the filibuster’s standing in their way and Democrats who were defending it. Some publications’ highly pliable principles on this subject tend to change with which party controls the Senate.That goes for not just publications but politicians. Back in 2005, Barack Obama was defending the filibuster, too, before he was president and determined to get his way.

It won’t be just the federal bench that will now be filled with nonentities and worse. An ambitious congressman named Mel Watt from North Carolina, who could be described as this era’s Barney Frank when it comes to inflating the housing market, is about to become the next head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Once there, he can set the stage for another housing boom and then bust like the one that set off the Great Recession in 2007-09. Happy Days are Here Again! The skies above are clear again/ so let’s sing a song of cheer again!For a while anyway. Why learn anything from past experience? It’s such a bother.

SPEAKING of past experience, this same Mark Pryor didn’t hesitate to filibuster a truly qualified nominee to the same appellate court a decade ago. The nominee was Miguel Estrada, the most promising pick for a high court since Richard S. Arnold was passed over for the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton, who preferred whatever mediocrity he finally settled on for the court. We forget which one; they all pale compared to the scholarship, precision, and concision Judge Arnold could have brought to the court, and did to more than one.

As was said of the eloquent Learned Hand, Richard Arnold may have been the greatest judge never to have served on the Supreme Court of the United States.

This nominee whom Mark Pryor sandbagged was entirely too conservative, too accomplished, and just too Hispanic-he was another immigrant who’d made good in what used to be the Land of Opportunity-to get the nod from the usual party hacks in the U.S. Senate, among them Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln.

Those senators could recognize someone who might be a great Supreme Court justice one day, and weren’t about to let his nomination even get to the floor for a vote. Lest a Republican president get credit for it. So they stalled and stalled his nomination until Miguel Estrada finally withdrew his good name from consideration. And the quality of the federal judiciary was much the poorer for it. But what, Mark Pryor care? He had his own low partisan agenda to follow.

And now Senator Pryor dares talk about how fair and impartial and nonpartisan he is. Whenever he pulls that stale routine again, just two words should be sufficient to expose his pose:

Miguel. Estrada.

Those two proper nouns should be pronounced slowly and distinctly to his face, the stress on the second syllable of each word, the R rolled to perfection, just the way we were taught in Spanish class, whenever our senior senator and windbag tries to get away with that brazen act of his.

The moral of this story and editorial: Mark Pryor needs to join Blanche Lincoln in well-deserved retirement at the earliest possible opportunity, which would be next year, when Arkansas has a chance to elect a fair-minded U.S. senator.

Editorial, Pages 78 on 12/15/2013