What's Nuclear?

04/25/2005

What's Nuclear?

If there was ever proof that changing the name of something doesn't change what it is or how it's perceived, the Republicans should have gotten the message when replacing the term "private accounts" with "personal accounts" didn't change the public's view of Social Security privatization. Redefining the "nuclear option" to end Senate filibusters by majority vote as the "constitutional option," and insisting that "nuclear option" is the Democrats' term, or even that the term really applies to the Democrats' threat to shut down the Senate in the aftermath, won't change the facts either.
To me, there's a very simple way of looking at this: The Senate has its own judiciary, in effect. It's called the Parliamentarian. The Senate Parliamentarian and his deputies immerse themselves in the Senate's rules and precedents. It takes years of apprenticeship to sit in the Parliamentarian's chair. At least in the days when I worked in the Senate (which, I will note once again was only eight years ago though sometimes I feel like it might as well have been the days of Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton), the Parliamentarian was treated with absolute respect.

The parliamentarian will rule that the attempt to change the Senate rules by majority vote is out of order. Yes, that's according to Senator Reid a week ago (Parliamentarians, by their very nature, don't speak publicly about potential rulings), but there's nothing in this article that suggests that any Republicans think the Parliamentarian would do otherwise.

The Senate makes its own rules, of course, and it is the Senator sitting in the President's chair (or the Vice President) who makes such a ruling. He can ignore the Parliamentarian's advice about what the rules are. But to do so is the very definition of Nuclear. You can do it, in the way that you can hit the accelerator after you've been pulled over by a state trooper, right after the trooper's gotten out of his car. You can do it, in the way that DeLay's Texas allies can try to strip Travis County prosecutor Ronnie Earle of his power to indict corrupt officials. You can do it, if you never expect to need the protection of those same laws or police officers or judges or prosecutors for yourself.

That should be the basic standard: If you willfully defy the very person you have entrusted to interpret and enforce your rules, you have gone Nuclear.

Posted by Mark Schmitt on 04/25/2005 at 02:44 PM in Decembrist archives | Permalink

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Mark Schmitt

04/25/2005

What's Nuclear?

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