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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (680911)	4/27/2005 11:36:12 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Sen. Strangelove Or: How Democrats stopped winning and learned to love the filibuster. BY PETE DU PONT Wednesday, April 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT Sen. Barbara Boxer is a longtime opponent of judicial nomination filibusters. Or she was. Suddenly the light has dawned, and she realizes how wrong she was to oppose them: "I thought I knew everything. I didn't get it. . . . I am here to say I was totally wrong." Other Democratic senators have had similar changes in belief: Joe Biden and Robert Byrd, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, Joe Lieberman, Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer and their erstwhile colleagues Lloyd Bentsen, and Tom Daschle have all vigorously opposed the use of the filibuster against judicial nominations. Mr. Schumer was for voting judicial nominations "up or down" without delay. Mr. Leahy flatly opposed a filibuster against Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination: "The president and the nominee and all Americans deserve an up-or-down vote." Mr. Harkin believed "the filibuster rules are unconstitutional," Mr. Daschle declared that "democracy means majority rule, not minority gridlock," and Mr. Kennedy that "senators who believe in fairness will not let the minority of the Senate deny [the nominee] his vote by the entire Senate." But that was then, when Democrats controlled the Senate. Now, they are a frustrated minority and it is different. Mr. Leahy has voted against cloture to end filibusters 21 out of 26 times; Mr. Kennedy, 18 out of 23. Now all these Senators practice and defend the use of filibusters against judicial nominees. This fundamental change in deeply held liberal beliefs has made a difference. Sen. Orrin Hatch notes that in the 108th Congress (2003-04) the Senate "voted on motions to end debate on judicial nominations 20 times. Each vote failed." Of the 51 judicial nominees President Bush has put forward for the circuit courts of appeals, 35 have been confirmed, 10 have been "debated" without conclusion--filibustered--and six were threatened with a filibuster so no action has been taken on their nomination. Mr. Bush nominated Justice Priscilla Owen of the Texas Supreme Court for the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals almost four years ago. She has the highest possible rating from the American Bar Association but has been filibustered four times by a Senate minority that once devoutly believed filibustering was morally wrong and clearly unconstitutional. So what of this supermajority rule requiring a three-fifths vote to end judicial confirmation "debate" in the Senate and force a vote? Why is it here, where did it come from, and should it be part of the Senate rules? This rule is not a constitutional requirement. The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to override a presidential veto, pass a constitutional amendment, approve treaties or expel a member of Congress. But all it says about judges is that they are appointed by the president with "the Advice and Consent of the Senate." Absent a constitutional requirement for a supermajority, a majority vote is sufficient. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that principle in 1892. When the Senate first established its rules in 1789, there was no such thing as a filibuster. A simple majority could move the previous question and vote on the matter before it. That was reversed in 1806 and the rules required unanimous consent to end debate; one senator could filibuster anything. In 1917 President Wilson, frustrated by a dozen Senators filibustering a wartime defense bill, observed that "the Senate of the United States is the only legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is ready for action." He successfully pressed the Senate to adopt Rule XXII, requiring only two-thirds instead of all senators to end debate on a pending statute. In 1975 that rule was amended to reduce the number to three-fifths, or 60 Senators. The filibuster has historically been used to block the passage of substantive measures--such as the antilynching bills of the 1930s, and the direct election of the president in the 1970s. And they will be used in the future--Sen. Schumer said on Monday that he would filibuster the energy bill because it is too kind to Big Oil. A filibuster is also likely to stop personally owned Social Security accounts if such legislation reaches the Senate floor. Current Senate rules prevent filibusters of some substantive matters--among them budget resolutions, trade agreements and the use of military force to protect America. But they do not limit the filibustering of judicial nominees. Some argue for abolishing the filibuster altogether, so that every legislative proposal reaching the Senate floor should be voted up or down and an angry minority would never be able to stop votes from occurring. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg says that the filibuster should not be elevated "into a moral principle"--that if the Republicans get rid if it for judicial nominations the Democrats should "get rid of it for everything else too." But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's proposal is not about that question. It is about eliminating the filibuster only for considering judicial nominations. Should the 60 votes required to end a judicial nominee's filibuster be done away with by adopting a nonfilibuster rule for judicial confirmations? It was branded a "nuclear option" by Sen. Trent Lott, a phrase media critics and Democratics have embraced, but it is in fact a sensible choice. In America's representative democracy there is a constitutional intention that majority congressional votes be determinative on all but a very few enumerated matters. Confirming presidential judicial nominations is not one of them. So when Mr. Frist offers his rule change in the next week or so, the Senate should pass it. Ms. Boxer may not vote for it, but five will get you 10 that if the Democrats one day regain control of the Senate, it will take her less than 20 seconds to decide that she had been totally wrong a second time--that judicial filibusters now should never be allowed. Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month. opinionjournal.com

To: Wayners who wrote (680911)	4/28/2005 4:57:30 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Mourning Mother Russia April 28, 2005 OP-ED COLUMNIST By DAVID BROOKS nytimes.com Vladimir Putin gave a bizarre speech this week in which he described the fall of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" and said that an "epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself." The sad thing is he is half right. Most of us are grateful for the fall of communism, but the phrase "epidemic of collapse" is not a bad description of what Russian society is suffering through right now. You can measure that collapse most broadly in the country's phenomenal population decline. According to U.N. projections, Russia's population will plummet from about 146 million in 2000 to about 104 million in 2050. Russia will go from being the 6th-most-populous country in the world to being the 17th. That population decline has a number of causes. The first is the crisis in the Russian family and the decline in fertility rates. Between 1981 and 2001, marriage rates in Russia dropped by a third, and divorce rates rose by a third, according to Russian government estimates. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out recently in one of the last issues of The Public Interest, Russia now has three divorces for every four marriages, an astounding rate of family breakups. As the Soviet regime disintegrated, Russian fertility rates fell through the floor, from 2.19 births per woman in 1986-87 to 1.17 in 1999. Birth rates have now recovered somewhat, but they are not even close to replacement levels. According to Eberstadt, Russia currently has about 160 deaths for every 100 births. The more shocking reason Russia's population is declining is that people are dying younger. Russians are now much less healthy than their grandparents were in 1960. In the past three decades, Russian mortality rates have risen by 40 percent. Russian life expectancies now approximate those in Bangladesh and are below India's. The health care system is in shambles. The risk of suffering a violent death is nine times as high for Russian men, compared with men in Israel. There's an explosion of heart attacks and strokes, thanks to smoking, increased vodka consumption and other ruinous lifestyle choices. The H.I.V./AIDS epidemic hasn't even been fully factored into the official statistics. According to Russian statistics, a 20-year-old man in 2000 had only a 46 percent chance of reaching age 65. (American 20-year-olds had about an 80 percent chance.) What we are seeing, in short, is a country with nuclear weapons that is enduring a slow-motion version of the medieval Black Death. Perhaps we should be thankful that the political and economic situation there isn't worse than it is. For, indeed, the paradox of Russia is that as life has become miserable in many ways, the economy has grown at an impressive clip. We can look back on this and begin to see a pattern that might be called Post-Totalitarian Stress Syndrome. When totalitarian regimes take control of a country, they destroy the bonds of civic trust and the normal patterns of social cohesion. They rule by fear, and public life becomes brutish. They pervert private and public morality. When those totalitarian regimes fall, different parts of society recover at different rates. Some enterprising people take advantage of economic recovery, and the result of their efforts is economic growth. But private morality, the habits of self-control and the social fabric take a lot longer to recover. So you wind up with nations in which high growth rates and lingering military power mask profound social chaos. This is what we're seeing in Russia. It's probably what we would be seeing in Iraq even if the insurgency were under control. And most frighteningly, it could be what we will be seeing in China for decades to come. On the surface, China looks much more impressive than Russia. But this is a country that will be living with the consequences of totalitarianism for some time. Thanks to the one-child policy, there will be hundreds of millions of elderly people without families to support them. Thanks to that same policy, and the cultural predilection for boys, there will be tens of millions of surplus single men floating around with no marital prospects, no civilizing influences, nothing to prevent them from assembling into violent criminal bands. At some point the power-hungry find a way to exploit social misery. At some point internal social chaos has international consequences. Fasten your seat belts. We could be in for a bumpy ride. E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company