John Podhoretz:
DEMOCRATS in Washington may be on the verge of making a calamitous political error. What's more, they have every reason to know it — because they saw Washington's Republicans make the same terrible mistake a decade ago.But because they are so convinced they are in the right — and because they live in an ideological bubble that deafens them in the same way that another bubble deafened House Republicans to the political consequences of their actions on Terri Schiavo — Washington's Democrats are going to go ahead and do themselves serious injury anyway.
Sometime in the coming month, Republicans in the Senate will force through a change in a Senate rule to allow candidates for judgeships to be confirmed by a simple majority vote of all 100 senators.
Votes are now being held up indefinitely via a long-established loophole, the filibuster.
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Democrats say unambiguously that they will gum up the Senate works in response. They will make it impossible for Republicans to take up legislation, to pass bills, to do much of anything.
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But if they actually follow through, they'll do themselves and their party great injury. Even though obstructionism is a vital weapon in a party's arsenal, it only works when it goes on below the radar.
The American people don't like it when politicians announce that they're going to see to it that nothing happens. Voters don't elect senators to do nothing.
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The Republican argument on behalf of the rules change is far simpler and easier to understand than the Democratic argument. Bush and the GOP will say all they've done is to allow a candidate a fair, up-or-down vote instead of all this fancy footwork designed to delay that vote indefinitely.
So go ahead, Harry Reid. Make George W. Bush's day. If Democrats go into an active and public stance of truculent obstruction, they will hand Bush a giant stick to beat them with when 33 senators — including 6 very vulnerable Democrats — face the voters in their states in 2006.
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