Newsflash: The Senate May Go Nuclear on Itself!

May the walls come tumblin' down, and the Days of the Sharp Elbows come to a grinding halt. It's not enough to use Rove's minions to attack AARP's stand against the Bush Social Security smokescreen with USA Next and the SwiftBooters screaming "Look Out! Here come the gay grannies spittin' on the troops as they come back home!" It's not enough to go off on a "window dressing" package tour of Brussels, Berlin, and Slovakia, eat a plate of french fries IN France, cancel the staged "town hall" meeting with "normal Germans" in favor of a round table "dish-cuss-shun" with HappyTalkers, then have Pootie basically say "Who the hell are you to talk to me about democracy?" Naw, we need to attack the filibuster, or cloture rule in the Senate, so a simple majority of Senators can stop debate on the judicial nominees Bush wants to ram through confirmation, many for the second time.

You go, Boy! Get after it! Get 'er done! YeeHaw and HowdyDoo!

Take a look at Jeffrey Toobin's piece, " Blowing Up the Senate," in The New Yorker. Read on as Arlen Specter waxes poetic, remembering the moderate Republicans who once roamed the earth:

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“We had a lot of senators,” he said. “We could go on and on and on,” and he named, as examples of this group, Bob Packwood, Mark Hatfield, Lowell Weicker, Charles Mathias, and John Heinz. “And we don’t have them now. So it’s not good for the Party, and it’s not good for the country. It’s not good for the Party because you need balance. You need to be a national Party.”

Read on some more as Specter reverse-ruminates over taking the teeth out of the filibuster:

“If the Republican caucus decides to consider it, I’ll give it some serious thought.” (on the very next day) Specter said he would use his “best efforts to stop any future filibusters... If a rule change is necessary to avoid filibusters, there are relevant recent precedents to secure rule changes with fifty-one votes.”

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I've got it! Let's not call it the "nuclear option." Let's call it the "constitutional option!" Yeah, that's the ticket - who needs to compromise with the Democratic minority, and "cool the coffee in the saucer" anyway? We've run roughshod over the country and the world for more than three years now. We're firmly entrenched at the state and local levels. We own patriotism. We own Jesus. We own the Ten Commandments. "We are the world, we'll kill your children." Ah, the beauty of "compassionate conservatism." Makes ya feel all cold and hairless, don't it?

I say do it! Try it on for size, see how it fits. Give every Republican Senator, Congressperson, Governor, Mayor, and County Commissioner a reason to run for the hills as the hollow hellhole you've made of our government collapses in on itself, insulated in puffed up punditry and hypocritic hogwash. Go on with your bad self like a half-assed Jaycee speaking at the Lions Club luncheon in AnyTown, USA. I dare you.

We just had more than one hundred Iraqis killed today south of Baghdad, lining up to get medical certificates in order to apply for work. We can't find Osama. People are beginning to forget what September 11th was all about. Who's gonna notice a little ol' thing like a "minor tweak" to the "cloture rule?" I'll tell ya who - millions of us, Mr. Specter, so grow a pair and regain the self confidence Jeffrey Toobin refers to in his article. Or get out of the way ~
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Excerpt from The New Yorker is © Copyright 2005, CondéNet. All rights reserved, and used here for contextual purposes only.