The Path to Self Destruction: "They left us no choice."

The US Senate Chose Self Destruction.  Message and warning to all of us:  yes, leaders of countries could choose nuclear war.  

In the long run, this mostly hurts Republicans.   They did it anyway.  Crazy!

Senators just chose nuclear war: Mutually Assured Destruction.     They chose it slowly, intentionally.    They did it for the same reasons Thucydides said Sparta went to war with Athens: gain, fear, honor.   Each side decided they had to.

Senators have a great deal more power than House members.  It is way better to be a senator than a member of Congress.  The proof is that people quit the House to run for the Senate, and no one quits the Senate to run for the House.

Senators are not simply part of majority teams.  Each individual senator has the individual power to stop things because of Senate rules on "nomination holds" and requirements for unanimous consent and the 60 vote filibuster.  The Senate called elimination of the filibuster rule the "nuclear option" because senators understood it to be the Senate equivalent of the suicidal Mutually Assured Destruction of a nuclear bomb exchange.  

Of immediate consequence to senators, it gives up their individual power.  If the Senate plays by the rules of "majority rule" then no member has veto privilege.   A senator is just a pea in a pod;  the side with 51 peas gets its way.

"The Democrats left us no choice."

Why did Republicans do it to themselves?  As Senator Kelly Ayotte says in this Fox interview, "The Democrats left us no choice."  She said that if the Democrats would filibuster this obviously qualified judicial nominee Neil Gorsuch then they would filibuster anyone.  

We got to this point because political re-alignment created two parties with little overlap in policy positions.  We have narrower tents for each party.  Democrats used to be the party of urban liberals and southern racists.  Now Democrats are the liberal party and Republicans are the party of Southern whites.  Democrats pretty much need to be supportive of abortion rights and Republicans need to oppose them.  Democratic grass roots activists require that a Democratic candidate support public employee unions, restrictions on guns, climate change regulations, and policies to assist disadvantaged groups.   Republican primary voters require Republicans to oppose government employees, dismiss climate change as an exaggerated fear, oppose abortion and be the party representing whites.

Beginning with Newt Gingrich's insight--proven correct in elections--voters respond well to language of harsh condemnation, in which the opposition was described as "disgusting" rather than "wrong", "treasonous" rather than "misguided", and "utterly corrupt" rather than "influenced."  There is less and less political room for officeholders to compromise or appear to compromise.   Voters in ones party would not stand for it.

After the death of Justice Scalia Republicans successfully denied Obama a hearing on Merrick Garland.  It broke a Senate norm and expectation but it was not clearly unconstitutional. The Senate simply refused to consider Obama's nominee to fill a vacancy when he had 11 months left in a 4 year term.  Some senators went on to say they would never consider a nominee, and if a Democrat were elected president and they would refuse any Democratic president's nominee.  Democratic senators--and Democratic voters--saw this as an insult to a sitting president and frightening.  If Republicans could get away with this then Republicans could do anything, and worse, Democratic voters would see incumbent Democrats as weak and worthless.   They would lose power and face, both.

The Democratic View of things

Something that could have happened did not.  Republican voters did not consider this an embarrassing abuse of power.  Republican voters accepted it.  Unaffiliated voters did not care.  The McConnell gambit worked.  Democrats hoped the public would be outraged.   They were not.  

Democrats could not let this insult stand.  Democrats had to respond.  Among Democratic voters a "red line" had been crossed.  Therefore, Democrats had to do a form of hostage exchange.   Republicans stopped perfectly qualified Garland; Democrats would have to stop perfectly qualified Gorsuch.

There was a way out of this.   McConnell could have arranged with Trump and Chuck Schumer a face-saving solution.   Trump could have put up a nominee--Gorsuch or someone else--and let Democrats save face by denying that nominee, and Republicans could have protested and let it go.  Republicans could have recognized that their flat denial of Garland his seat required a Democratic response--tit for tat--and then got their second nominee through easily, and done so preserving the filibuster rule.

McConnell did not do it.   Possibly it is simply a failure of leadership.  Sometimes countries chose self destruction because the leader lacks imagination and foresight.  In hindsight, August of 1914 witnessed that as Europe fell into a world war that destroyed the empires of the participants.  In this case McConnell had his imperative: to save face among Republican senators and voters Republicans had to win.  

McConnell feared his own Republican voters and he saw that they responded to bold, aggressive talk and action of the kind voiced by Trump, not tentative, nuanced, actions of the kind that preserves the rules of the Senate.   Indeed, one of the messages of the Trump triumph was the bipartisan realization that voters considered bipartisan politeness, nuance, balance, mutual respect and understanding of the interests of others to be weakness.  The formal civility of the Senate made senators look like fancy pants sissies.  That mild tone and polite language was the Obama way of doing things.  Trump talked tough and people liked it.   

The election was a rejection of expertise and bipartisanship and globalism and respect for diversity.  That was Hillary's thing, and Obama's.  The Trump-Republican triumph was a triumph of our side winning.  

Democratic activists were watching closely whether Democratic senators would "take this lying down" and accept the humiliation by Republicans by doing for Gorsuch what Republicans refused to do for Garland.   They could not.  Whether in tribal war, or the theft of Helen by the Trojans, or a prisoner exchange, if one side breaks the rule the other side must respond or forever be the vassal.  

There will be consequences from this nuclear war inside the Senate.   The power of members is much diminished.   The confirmation of Gorsuch by the Senate confirms the partisan nature of Supreme Court judges, confirming that they are politicians in the arena, not above it.  This weakens the Court.  

Most of all, the end of the filibuster rule is a benefit for Democrats.  Remember, traditionally Democrats are the party that wants good and more government.  Republicans are the party that thinks it wants small government.   The filibuster rule historically stops things.

This nuclear war mostly hurts Republicans.  

Ending the Filibuster was a big mistake for Republicans.

Sometime in the next decade Democrats will control several of the arms of government.  They will retake the House or Senate or White House, or all of them.  Big legislation, e.g. civil rights legislation, got stopped by the filibuster rule in the 1960s.  Sooner or later there will be opportunity for big legislation, for example Medicare for All.  Narrow Democratic majorities will make it happen in the absence of the filibuster.

The news today is about the American military response to Syria's Assad, but I make a prediction:  fifty years from now the important news of this day will be the Senate's decision to choose the nuclear option and end the filibuster.