Bainbridge Has Good Insights Into Filibuster Compromise

Professor Bainbridge is another conservative Republican who agrees that the filibuster compromise was a master stroke by its Republican co-creators.

He makes the valid observation that while the Dems deserve condemnation for threatening to obstruct the President's judicial nominees, the controversy over the so-called nuclear option would not have happened if Senator Hatch, as Judiciary Committee chair, hadn't instituted new procedures that did damage to the traditional "advice and consent" procedures of the Senate.

Hatch also observed that conservatives who advocated doing away with the filibuster for judicial appointment debates were violating a fundamental tenet of conservative thinking.

Sadly, there's a lot of that going around these days. It's an endemic temptation for those who acquire power to violate their principles for short-term gain.

I believe that because elections are supposed to mean something, Presidents should be expected to nominate candidates for the bench who share their philosophies and that the process should assume the President's nominees will be confirmed barring the surfacing of ethical or legal problems.

Ending this game of chicken was smart politics on the part of the Republicans who helped craft the compromise. Unfortunately, it appears that the penhcant for going down in a blaze of glory, so often the experience of conservatives for the decades when they were out of power, has become such an established modus operandi that they don't yet know how to win through compromise and statesmanship once they're in power. Happily, people like McCain, Warner, DeWine, and Graham are on hand to remind us all of this.