Making it real

I don't remember the year. I do remember hearing the news reports on those cold and dark mornings as I choked down one of my grandmother's gawdawful biscuits before going to school. (Gram baked a dozen every week for us and in Mom's waste-not-want-not home, I'm the one who was stuck eating them because nobody else would.) I suspect it was those biscuits, though, that made me try to focus on something else, anything else, but that rock I expected to gnaw through, somehow, which is why I remember it as clearly as I do.

Day after day, the voice coming through the radio reported on the drama of the continuing filibuster.

I don't know if I already knew what one was (kinda), if I asked (and that's how it was explained) or because it was such a big deal if it was mentioned at school by my teacher. I can not begin to tell you how impressed I was that one person could talk non-stop for that many days. No wonder it was on the news every morning!

(That little misunderstanding of mine was straightened out years later, but we're still talking decades ago because that's when schools stopped teaching Civics.)

This so-called filibustering of Dubya's judicial nominees isn't really one. As Dick Morris explains:

The Republican leaders, and the Democratic majority leader before them, have allowed the filibuster to be rehabilitated in the public mind by agreeing not to stage one. The gentlemanly filibusters of the modern era, where each side concedes unless one has 60 votes, have permitted virtual filibusters that incur no public wrath.

Rather than push the so-called "nuclear option," Morris suggests a different option that's simplicity itself: A better option on judges: Bring on a real filibuster.