Judicial Follies
Power Line
ABC rewrites history with this account of the filibusters of the 1960s:
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The filibuster has been used historically by the minority party, which can't win with a vote count. Democrats have opposed the filibuster before - in the 1960s, they accused Republicans of using it to block civil rights legislation.
According to the Senate Historical Office, the record for the longest individual speech is held by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. To keep the floor, he read some of his wife's recipes and passages from novels out loud.
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If you check ABC's site now, you'll see that they have silently corrected the error.
I would have thought that pretty much everyone knew that it was Democrats who filibustered the civil rights act.
The fact that this howler got by the eagle-eyed editors at ABC raises, once again, the question whether the fabled multiple levels of editing and review that the MSM are always telling us about actually exist.
Here's another one, which, as of this writing, has not been corrected: the Associated Press, in an article titled "Reid: Bush, GOP Seek to Reinvent Reality," discusses the Priscilla Owen nomination, and includes a photograph of Justice Owen. Only it's not Owen, it's Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Who is quite obviously, as they say in the sports world, no relation.
But the ultimate folly, pointed out by Dafydd ab Hugh, was committed by the Congressional Black Caucus, which engaged in one of the weirdest bits of logical jujitsu I've seen in a long time:
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Restricting the ability of Democrats to block final votes on several of Bush's most controversial nominees "would be particularly offensive to people of color", members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote Majority Leader Bill Frist during the day. "All of the major legislation that today bars racial discrimination in voting, employment and housing was passed after filibusters" were broken, it said.
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Dafydd writes:
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Work with me on this... it would be "offensive to people of color" to break the filibuster -- because "all of the major legislation that today bars racial discrimination" was filibustered?
Did I miss a class?
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It would be hard to think of a public issue that has caused as many bad arguments to be made as the debate over the filibuster, but this one is in a class by itself.
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