The news of the day is that Sen. Richard Shelby has placed a "hold" on every single pending Obama nominee, until the Democrats give in to his blackmail and fork over a few billion dollars in defense pork for Alabama. This could be, as Josh Marshall suggests, a shark-jumping moment for the GOP. But I doubt it.
Republicans' audacity about these kinds of things has changed the standards of what we consider audacious. You might remember how, back when George W. Bush was president and Democrats were filibustering a few truly abominable judicial nominees, Republicans considered eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominations but keeping it on everything else. This idea was considered so radical it was termed the "nuclear option," in that it would incinerate the Senate and vaporize any hope of cross-partisan comity for all time. But now this kind of stuff barely raises an eyebrow, particularly among a press corps that has gotten used to the idea that Republicans play hardball, Democrats don't do anything about it because they're wimps, and therefore the latest outrage is barely worth taking note of. Jonathan Chait explains why this is possible:
Many of the changes in American politics over the past three decades have involved the two parties slowly doing away with social norms that preventing them from using every tool at their disposal. The Senate minority could filibuster every single bill the majority proposed, but you just didn't do that, until you did. You could use a House-Senate conference to introduce completely new provisions into a bill, but you just didn't do that, until you did. (The topic became common in the Bush administration.) The possibility was always there to use endless amendments to filibuster a reconciliation bill. But nobody thought to do that until Republicans floated the tactic this week.The "hold" is a now similar tool to what the filibuster was forty years ago. It's a sparingly-used weapon meant to signal an unusually intense preference. A Congressional scholar reports that putting a blanket hold on all the president’s nominees has never been done before. But there's no rule that says you can't. It's just not done, until it is.
The main thing that keeps those kinds of norms in place isn't the good will of all involved -- it's the understanding that if you violate them, there will be some kind of cost. The problem today is that there is no foreseeable cost for this kind of move.
Take the filibuster, for instance. Under the rules that obtained when Strom Thurmond was bellowing from the Senate floor about the dangers of race-mixing, undertaking a filibuster had a cost. Namely, it was a huge pain in the ass -- you had to keep talking, and you weren't allowed to leave, even to go to the bathroom. Partly because of that, the filibuster was used only rarely. It just wasn't something you would want to do every day. Since then the Senate's rules have been changed, and now all you have to do to undertake a filibuster is express your intention to do so. When a party decides they'd like to just filibuster everything -- as today's Republicans have -- there's no reason they can see not to go ahead and do it.
If there's no practical cost, the only thing left to stop them from filibustering everything, or putting a blanket hold on every nominee to extort some pork for Alabama, is the possibility of a political cost. At this point, that's up to the Democrats to impose. It would require a little bit of toughness: they'd have to have everyone go out and say, over and over so it would take over the news, that Richard Shelby and his Republican friends are despicable extortionists who will sabotage the operation of the United States government for the sake of some pork-barrel earmarks. They could also fit it into a larger narrative about nihilistic Republicans who care so little about the country's fate that they will do virtually anything to subvert the administration, no matter what the cost, if they think it will gain them some advantage or some pork. If Democrats made enough noise about it, Shelby would back down, and it might even convince Republicans to think twice the next time one of them considers undertaking this kind of extortion.
Is that something Democrats are willing to do? Or are they afraid it would seem impolite?
-- Paul Waldman
(Flickr/Stephen Grose)
