West Virginia daily

In case you haven't noticed, there is a frantic effort being made by the Democrats to convince you that majority rule in the U.S. Congress is somehow a threat to all your rights. The Democratic National Committee's website, speaking of what it calls the “nuclear option” to change Senate Rules to end filibusters that have been blocking votes on judicial nominees of President Bush for more than 4 years, says:

“Senate Republicans are going for the ultimate power grab. They're planning to give themselves absolute power, silencing Senate Democrats (and the millions of Americans they represent) by changing the rules and traditions of the Senate and eliminating the filibuster, a two-century Senate tradition that has preserved the voice of the minority.

“No more debate. No more dissent. No more checks and balances. Nothing stopping the Republicans from ramming the Bush agenda through.”

I'm old enough to have listened to some of the major filibusters in Senate history on national news. In the first place, the notion that the U.S. Senate had the right to question, much less abuse, a President's nominee for a judgeship is a very recent innovation in the Senate. I was 20 years old, and had been married for 3 years, when Democrat President Harry S. Truman in 1949 nominated a former US Senator from Indiana, Sherman Minton, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Someone on the Senate Judiciary Committee remembered that Minton wanted to pass a bill to restructure the Supreme Court and they decided for the first time, EVER, to summon a judicial nominee to testify before the Judiciary Committee to explain his views. Minton refused the summons, stating that “as a Senate leader in the 1930s, he had the right to advocate his party's views to the best of his ability. But, now, as a federal judge, he had moved from player to referee.” The Senate Judiciary Committee meekly backed off and Minton was handily approved by the Senate.

What is it that has changed over the years that has led the U.S. Senate Democrats to demand that a minority, rather than a majority, rule the Senate and to have the power to block the Executive branch of the U.S. Government? Well, to put it in the exact words of the Democrats on their own website, their fear is, if they cannot control the judgeships,

“The whole Republican agenda will become the law of the land because the GOP will have silenced all effective opposition.”

Well, duh! Isn't that what we were doing last November – choosing the President and the Congress that we wanted to write and adopt the laws of the land? What exactly HAVE filibusters protected us from over the years? Well, let's look at the 4 longest filibusters in Senate History.

Democrat Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana, in 1935 (when the senate was 2/3rds Democrat) spoke for 15 yours and 30 minutes to force Democrat leaders to submit nominations for senior employees of Roosevelt's new National Recovery Administration to the Senate for confirmation. The motive for his filibuster was to prevent any of his political enemies in Louisiana from obtaining lucrative NRA jobs. The entire issue disappeared when the US Supreme Court a short time later declared the NRA unconstitutional.

In 1953, Democrat Senator Wayne Morse, who believed in socialism and federal control of resources, spoke for 22 hours and 26 minutes against the Tidelands Oil Bill that gave the states control over off-shore oil assets.

And, then of course, there was the June 10, 1964 filibuster of West Virginia's white-supremist Democrat Senator , Robert C. Byrd, who spoke for 14 hours and 13 minutes in passionate opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Bill . Former Klansman and white supremacist Byrd is still in the Senate and is one of the leaders in filibustering judicial appointees of President George W. Bush. He said any attempt to “curtail the right of extended debate in this hallowed chamber” or to claim that no right exists to filibuster judges aims an arrow straight at the heart of the Senate's long tradition of unlimited debate. . . . We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws."

Think about that for a moment. The major filibusters that have EVER taken place in the U.S. Senate were and are efforts to evade MAJORITY rule and the Constitution of the United States! There is NOTHING in the U.S. Constitution that authorizes a filibuster. It is merely the Senate's outdated “tradition of unlimited debate…”

Until 1842, both the House and the Senate had “unlimited debate.” By then the House had grown in numbers from its original 57 and the Members agreed to a permanent rule that limited debate in the House and in the Committee of the Whole to one hour. This change in rules did not seem to create a problem – much less did it create a Nazi Germany or Mussolini style dictatorship.

It is ridiculous that we have so little understanding of our own Constitution – and our own recent history of the use of filibusters – such as Senator Robert C. Byrd's filibuster in support of white supremacy, that we would even hesitate to change such absurd rules. Where is America's “Independent Judiciary” when a minority can prevent the majority from even VOTING on a presidential nominee in the U.S. Senate – and thereby block the will of the voters who went to the polls to elect people that would represent them?

When a small group of obstructionists can thwart millions of voters who selected the people they wanted to run this country we have a serious Constitutional crisis. There IS no “independent judiciary” if a the only major Federal court nominees who can get approved are those who will promise before hearing a single case how they will rule on an issue!

It's time for the public to support the creation of an Independent Judiciary. The first step to creating an Independent Judiciary is end rules that allow anti-civil rights dinosaurs like Senator Robert Byrd to control the Senate with filibusters.

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