The Vertebrate Option

Plenty has been written in speculation of whether senate Republicans will ever work up the personal fortitude necessary to modify Senate rules to stop the minority's denial of floor votes to conservative judicial candidates. At somepoint someone coined the term "nuclear option" to describe the majority making a change to the rules. In this view, civilization itself rests on the constancy of Senate rules, but only as long as Democrats aren't in the majority. In that case rules changes are par for the course.

I must assume that the purpose of coining the term "nuclear option" is to create a rhetorical situation in which senate Republicans are made to feel as if they must provide an extraordinary level of justification for changing what the holy Democrat party has engraved. As usual, Senate Republicans have accepted this propaganda at face value and proceeded to do just that.

I'm sick of this. Let's call it what it is. Making it explicit that judicial nominations get the benefit of a floor vote by majority consent is not "nuclear" does not destroy some foundational notion of our government, it does not undo representative government, and most of all, it in no way contradicts the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution. No, the majority setting the rules of debate in the Senate is the tradition, is an exercise of representative government and is indeed Constitutional.

The majority should eliminate this ambiguity of the Senate's rules without apologizing to the minority and without adopting their rhetoric. This I call "the vertebrate option". If we can't do that much, then I'd say Buschbaum's classic work is a prophetic description of the early 21st century Republican party.