Insults to Intelligence

LATimes Opinion Page Editor Andres Martinez has a signed op/ed in today's LAT that is quite a piece of work. One would think that in his signed pieces, Martinez might go out of his way to be reasoned, judicious and fair ... oh, but this is the LA Times, and once again, he is anything but.

First, he discusses the recent Senate filibusters without once differentiating between judicial nominee filibusters and legislative filibusters, an error of omission that was the common deceit of the Dem position throughout the years of denying Bush judicial nominees an up or down vote.

Either he thinks all his readers are completely up to date on the issue, or he's conveniently avoiding a point Dems are uncomfortable with. In either case, it's an insult to the intelligence of his readers.

Then he mentions a particularly tragic filibuster of the past, one that stopped a 1930s law that would have criminalized racist lynchings, without ever mentioning that the forces behind that filibuster, Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi and Richard Russell of Georgia, both unrepentent racists until their dying day, were Democrats, and were supported by Democrats who refused to help break the filibuster.

Again, either he thinks his readers understand this, or he's shading the truth. Insulted again.

Finally, after defending the Dem position by omission after omission, he denies that same position, starting with an ironic lead-in, then getting to the point:

These senators are insulting our intelligence. The filibuster is an anti-democratic instrument that upsets the delicate system of checks and balances already written into the Constitution. Liberal Democrats in the Senate aren't in favor of lynching, but they are fighting to preserve a reactionary weapon that, in future wrenching national debates, will empower obstructionists to kidnap that body just as they did during the civil rights debates. Not acknowledging that the filibuster was at issue in the lynching context, not even to address the filibuster's tarnished history, amounts to intellectual cowardice.

The Senate centrists have promised to filibuster judicial nominees only in "extraordinary circumstances," which presumably will include the resignation of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. When that happens, Majority Leader Bill Frist should again attack the filibuster, and not just for judicial confirmation battles.

If the Senate really wants to atone for its past sins, it should nuke the filibuster for all purposes.

An interesting and entirely defensible position, Constitutionally speaking. Martinez should have pointed out that the Dems recently used it to avoid those same "delicate checks and balances" by going far beyond their "advise and consent" authority.

I prefer keeping the filibuster, but going back to the old rules of the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington era. Make 'em stand up in front of the nation for hours on end, making fools of themselves, showing themselves for what they are instead of hiding behind modified, protective procedures, and let the people decide what they think of filibusters and filibusterers.