We're All Going to Sit Here and Tolerate Our Busted Government, Right?

Issue number one for Tea Partiers and liberals and real conservatives alike should be total wholesale political slaughter of members of the Senate who have both allowed or actively gone down the noble road of blocking appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, like the incident yesterday blocking reasonably pro-worker Craig Becker. Becker’s appointment, as you undoubtedly know, did not pass, with 52 votes for his appointment and 33 against. (15 were unable to attend due to “snow.”) Scott Brown still got there to vote against him, though! And he had a rationale: “Brown described his decision against Becker as pro-jobs, not antilabor.” Nice one! Not that Brown’s vote mattered, because we live in a country where a majority vote no longer dependably passes legislation.

Quite obviously, historically the filibuster was regarded as “a revolt, not against the other party, but against the Senate itself. The senator doing the talking could be a lone swashbuckler, of a sort.” Now it is a group bully tactic.

And that the Democrats have allowed this should, and possibly will, be their undoing. Says John Gage, the head of the American Federation of Government Employees:

“You’re just not going to be able to go to our membership in the November elections and say, ‘Come on, let’s do it again. Look at what the Democratic administration has done for us!’” Gage said. “People are going to say, ‘Huh? What have the Democrats done for us?’”

Not much of anything, that’s what.

If you’d like to think about this further, here is a delightfully snide piece that lectures Teh Liberuls on the historical importance of the filibuster, which stresses the importance of the right of the minority to be heard. It’s neat to watch the right suddenly start embracing the language of an 80s Ivy League campus. This language is also insanely misleading. His argument is that the massive Democratic majority in Congress is an aberration, so we should wait until that’s not true to… pass any legislation, basically. Oh look, Congress apparently agrees!

But, think of democracy! “Majorities can be tyrannical,” warns Jay Ambrose in the SF Examiner!

Unfortunately, Congress is tasked to run its day to day operations as a majority-rule body. When the Demoncrats come to change the Constitution or revoke the Supreme Court or declare war or something, then, awesome, yes, then you get to filibuster all night long.