WSJ on the Filibuster Deal

And I thought the deal was a bunch of crap, the Wall Street Journal lets fly with this Seante Charade. The WSJ makes a couple of important points.

First, because the Constitution grants the President the power to appoint justices and judges and gives the Senate the power of Advice and Consent, but the "President is granted the power to nominate judges under the Constitution because he is the only official elected by the entire nation. He shouldn't cede that authority to 14 Senators in desperate search of political cover." The fact is that these 14 Senators (whose motivations I have discussed here and there) hope to be the kingmakers for any Supreme Court nominee surely to come in the next couple of years, if not this summer. But "[t]o vet his [Bush's] nominees with this Gang of 14 is a virtual guarantee of judicial mediocrity--of a lowest-common-denominator choice or a philosophic cipher."

It strikes me as odd that this gang of 14 have agreed to filibuster only in extreme circumstances. But what does that mean? Here is one example, which is quite funny, but demonstrative of the subjective nature of extreme. For example, having been a Maryland graduate, I would find anyone who attended Duke Law School to be an extreme choice, if only because they went to Duke.

But if President Bush nominates a true conservative, what then. As WSJ points out, such a move all but guarantees:

liberal interest groups will now be obliged to manufacture the very "extraordinary circumstances" that would give Democrats among the Gang of 14 an excuse to filibuster. Thus they will have even greater incentive than before to dig through a nominee's personal and professional life for any mud they can throw against him. In the name of consensus and comity, in short, these 14 "moderates" have increased the chances that the Senate will witness a future, bloody Borking.

Of course, the WSJ fails to point out that while 7 Democrats signed the agreement, the GOP would have to get 5 of them to vote on a cloture motion, six if GOP moderate Lincoln Chafee croses party lines. Getting five of these Senators to agree to cross their party line to bring cloture is an uphill battle, because one only need to invent some extreme circumstance to justify a filibuster.

This summer could be a lot of fun!!!