Compromised Compromise
This column was written by Terence Samuel.
The durability of the eleventh-hour deal that derailed the filibuster cataclysm in the Senate late Monday was called into question not just by opponents of both sides of the issue but also by -- as they say in combat -- facts on the ground.
The culture wars leave almost no room for compromise, and the culture wars dominate our politics these days.
After having pilloried them as out-of-the-mainstream and hostile to civil rights and workers' rights, Democrats agreed to accept three of the most conservative judges sent up for confirmation. Republicans, after saying this was a fight about principle, cut a deal that would jettison some of the judges. And they gave away their chance to set rules that could have changed the face of the federal judiciary.
The deal was anomalous, because it made both sides vulnerable to capitulation and hypocrisy. It was not long before those charges were leveled. But maybe the easiest way to gauge whether this was a compromise with real costs is to note that both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Reverend James Dobson's Focus on the Family decried the deal as a stinker and threatened to mobilize against it.
And it is those competing armies on the left and on the right that seem destined to run over this agreement like a semi over a caterpillar.
Add to that a clear sense that the GOP Senate leadership (which had the deal foisted on it) seems determined to blow it up at the earliest opportunity. After the agreement was reached, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist reminded everyone that he was not a part of the deal, and he reserved the right to resurrect the nuclear option at any point he feels necessary.
"I do not want to use the constitutional option, but bad faith and bad behavior during my tenure as majority leader will bring the Senate back to the point where all one hundred members will be asked to decide whether judicial nominees deserve a fair up-or-down vote."
The deal itself may come up for an up-or-down vote before long.
But despite the furor it produced on both sides, it was easy to determine the winner: The ones holding the victory parties would be an important clue, and Democrats did that on more than one occasion this week. Judging from the rage emanating from the upper echelons of the Senate GOP, you'd have to call this one for the Dems.
The questions, going forward, become how significant a victory was it and what to do with it if you're a Democrat in the minority -- with little ability to set the agenda and a formidable opposition that has made clear that the deal is, in the words of Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT), "a truce not a treaty."
The Democratic strategy is to try to change the subject away from values issues, which have proved their nemesis, to economic ones. After they urged the Republicans to "move on" and to "get over" the deal, Democrats say they are now going to talk about national security, the economy, education, and retirement. It is an argument they have a better chance of winning if they could get those issues on the agenda. But is hard to see how that happens when the GOP has better agenda-setting tools and when moral value issues continue to dominate the political debate. Clearly what the Democrats are counting on is what the see as the GOP tendency to overreach, epitomized by the reaction to the Terri Schiavo case.
Anyone who watched, as Washington has grown increasingly fractious in recent years, had to be skeptical about the possibility an agreement of the kind reached on Monday by the seven Democrats and seven Republicans -- and even more doubtful about its long-range prospects. In the end, the fight over the filibuster and the nuclear option had less to do with judges and filibustering than it had to do with abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, and contraception -- those values questions that now consume much of our political oxygen to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Those issues are central to why President George W. Bush won reelection and why Frist (who plans to run for the White House next year) has been so vigorous in his support of the nuke option. Evangelicals and other Christian conservatives, who have been driving the battle for a more conservative judiciary, have little interest in talking about anything else. And now they are mad too!
Indeed, having gotten an agreement to confirm three of the most conservative judges nominated by the president (Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, and William Pryor) to seat of the federal appeals courts, Christian conservatives called the deal a betrayal by the Republican signatories, because they wanted all seven of the president's nominees. "It is senators like [Mike] DeWine and [John] Warner and [Lindsey] Graham who have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory," lamented the conservative Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, who told National Public Radio that his group will spend time talking to Christian congregations around the country about what he regards as the betrayal of those and the other four GOP senators who signed on to the no-filibuster, no-nuclear-option deal.
"And it won't take long for them [the congregations] to take action on their own," Perkins promised.
The group of 14 senators who brokered the deal is often described as a collection of moderates and centrists, and there may be some truth to that by virtue of the fact that they defied their leaderships and came up with the deal. But Senator John Warner (R-VA) a centrist? Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) a moderate?
And it is one of the great ironies of the moment to have the religious right attack Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for being part of this deal when he may have done more than anyone other than the president to help get Bill Pryor permanently elevated to a seat on the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Pryor, a staunch Catholic and vocal opponent of abortion rights, is beloved by the religious conservatives; he has become a symbol of what they are fighting for. And no one argued his case with more passion over the last weeks and months than Graham; he took personally the attacks against Pryor and made clear that he was ready to vote for the nuclear option as a countermeasure.
"The problem I've had with Bill Pryor and the way he has been handled is that he is the type of person I grew up with," said Graham." He is a conservative person. He is a good family man, but he has made some calls in Alabama that are unbelievably heroic when it comes to politics and the law."
But remember: The culture wars leave no room for compromise. And that is why this deal may soon be dead.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
By Terence Samuel
Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02109. All rights reserved