PAGE ONE OF WAPO - GOP Tilting Balance Of Power to the Right

[steve2470]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/25/AR2005052501997_2.html

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 26, 2005; Page A01

As Democrats tell it, this week's compromise on judges was about much more than the federal courts. If President Bush and congressional allies had prevailed, they say, the balance of power would have been forever altered.

Yet, amid the partisan rhetoric, a little-noticed fact about modern politics has been lost: Republicans have already changed how the business of government gets done, in ways both profound and lasting.

Graphic
Power in Numbers
A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise agreement in which seven Democrats would use their votes to prevent filibusters on three of President Bush's judicial nominees in exchange for seven Republican votes against a ban on all judicial filibusters, known as the "nuclear option."


The campaign to prevent the Senate filibuster of the president's judicial nominations was simply the latest and most public example of similar transformations in Congress and the executive branch stretching back a decade. The common theme is to consolidate influence in a small circle of Republicans and to marginalize dissenting voices that would try to impede a conservative agenda.





<SNIP>

[truthisfreedom]

1. lucky for us, the thugs are their own worst enemies. they have vision of

America that doesn't exist in reality, and the more they push, the more their own constituency will be reduced to tears in a realization of lost liberty.

[CWebster]

4. Not to be cynical, but I doubt it

Seems rather than confront that reality folks would prefer to have their illusions not questioned - if only to avoid pain and embarrassment--or they escape into cult-like religion as the dulling opiate of denial.

[CWebster]

2. The more you study it the worse it looks

Everyone's first clue should've been that this was masterminded by a group of the most conservative "Democrats" who have been aiding and abetting the shift to the Right all along.

[xchrom]

3. internally i don't think the gop

thinks of the compromise as a loss.

i wouldn't if i were them.

maybe it's not the walls of jericoh come tumblin down -- but there are more reactionary judges on the bench today than there were yesterday. that's a win.

and as far as the article is concerned -- uh the balance has been shifting since reagan.
you can see/track the transformation.
it's not exactly ''news'' -- maybe to some...

[bklyncowgirl]

5. He should add to the mix a compliant new media which has not...

questioned in any serious way what these guys are doing.

This is serious stuff and for the first time in my life, I am truly afraid for what my country is becoming. These forces were always there but there was also always something effective to balance them.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. The Post finally gets it?

It's a little disingenuous for the Post, but at least they're learning.

The Republicans rigged the game back in the late 1990s. So why has the Post taken so long to get around to admitting it? Simple. The Republicans were expected to roll over the Democrats and crush all opposition. They were unable to do that, so it gave the Democrats a partial, but pyrrhic, victory.

Seven Democrats may have "defected", but so have seven Republicans, and the Republicans are NOT taking it well at all. The effective balance of power was pulled leftward after nearly eight years of absolute hard-ass right-winger domination.

No, it wasn't a big victory for us, but it was a much bigger loss for them. So what we've begun to see is a breakdown in solidarity and the party's iron discipline.

This is an opening for us to push every victory we get, no matter how small or abstract. We don't have to give up our dreams to acknowlege that the deathgrip has been loosened. And if "Joementum" Lieberman wants to take the risks and do the dirty work, well, that's fine with me.

--p!

[blm]

7. They couldn't have done it without their lapdogs in the media.

Lapdogs always ready to please their fascist masters.