commentary by Michael L. Bromley
copyright 2005

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... of Politics

Mar 11/ 05: Conservatives, slave apologists, nuclear madmen, and all-round scumbags coming your way down the right side of the isle of the United States Senate. The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" this week lays its delicate, observant and sickeningly biased touch upon the prospects of "going nuclear" in the Senate to stop Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees. Nuke 'Em, the column is called, and in it we get this stupidly selective history of the filibuster:

The filibuster has been around in one form or another since 1806, when the Senate absent-mindedly neglected to readopt a rule allowing a simple majority to move the previous question. It has been a favored tactic of conservatives of a particularly hard-shelled type, who have used it in the service, successively, of preserving slavery, perpetuating white supremacy, and frustrating what Lady Bracknell disapprovingly called “social legislation.”

That is, according to Hendrik Hertzberg.

To save you the mouse clicks, Lady Bracknell is the cynical, social climbing, money-sucking, socialite and former lower class now elitist snob in The Importance of Being Earnest. Knowing such things is a New Yorker device for selecting the correct readership. If you didn't make the connection, you're not allowed in the door. Secret handshake, and all that.

Now back to the lies:

By Hertzberg's account, liberal Democrats' filibuster of President Bush's judicial nominees is justified because conservatives, a.k.a. present day Republicans, abused the device in the past in defense of slavery, white supremacy and Lady Bracknell's social Darwinism. His paragraph continues:

By the same token, liberals, historically, have passionately called for its abolition. Lately, the roles have reversed. Now it’s conservatives who indignantly denounce the filibuster as undemocratic. And, oddly, they’re right—sort of.

There was nothing "conservative" in southern Democrats' filibusters of anti-slavery legislation or anything that slightly reeked of weakening slavery. They were reactionaries, not conservatives. The "white supremacists" who next abused the filibuster a century later were also southern Democrats. Hertzberg takes things awful far to loop John Calhoun and Strom Thurman (v. 1948) into modern conservatism and President Bush's nominees. But of course, for conservatives are slavers, racists, elitists, and bomb throwers.

It's kinda hard to find anything but modern Lady Bracknells outside of the offices of The New Yorker, or the favorite Village restaurant, when those princes of culture and taste look only upon mirrors. Those "white supremacists" are modern-liberalism's elders, not the conservatives'. That the Republican party has triumphed in middle America, especially in the South, is not because of racism and slavery -- that's the Democratic legacy -- but because of the natural conservatism and constitutional loyalty that middle America demands. The Republicans give it to them free of the old Democratic baggage of race.

Elsewhere, Hertzberg's history is just wrong. The filibuster was as much abused by Southern reactionaries as by leftists such as Robert LaFollette and his political, populist offspring, Wayne Morse, whose Senate biography sets as his highest achievement a 22:26 hour filibuster that broke Bobby LaFollette's 1908 record. Neither filibuster did any good other than to add a footnote to their records of hysteria. Hertzberg next says that the filibuster is the least of the undemocratic sins of the United States Senate, the worst being that geographical division of power in the Senate's constitutional role to represent the States. It's an astonishing challenge in that Hertzberg's entire point is that current Democrats ought be able to play with the filibuster, too, since slavery apologists got away with it 150 years ago. Uh...

Where but from 4 Times Square -- oh, a subsidiary of Conde Naste -- could we get such a lovely, confused, and childish righteousness? It ain't gonna play outside of 10002, Hertzberg. I hadn't realized that this little division of Conde Naste had so given itself to niche marketing. The great name of New York deserves so much better.

I will give Hertzberg this: the filibuster is often the tool of reactionaries, fanatics, and the desperate. And so it is today.

Note: Here for U.S. Senate testimony by Prof. Steven Calabresi of  Northwestern University Law School condemning the filibuster and its origins in Calhoun's stand for slavery. While I quite agree with the Professor that Calhoun's legacy is not modern conservatism, I do wish to note that the Professor ignores, as does Hertzberg, other instances of the use of the filibuster by leftist radicals and other assorted malcontents.
 

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