"Nebraskans... watched as she recounted the plot of Penguins of Madagascar. As she made a case for the Oxford comma ('Clarity is key')."

"As she listed her favorite things to put in salads ('Nothing better than a fresh tomato'). As she held forth on the history of the word queue, shared a memory of her mother trying to teach her how to play bridge, and explained, in exhaustive detail, the rules of the legislature that allowed her to take up so much time. She took up more time still by decrying the legislation she opposed — not only LB 574 but also a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. She filibustered almost every bill that came to the floor, preventing the legislature from voting on almost all of the 812 bills introduced this year, including some she supported. 'I’m not going to discriminate,' she said.... From the beginning, Cavanaugh knew she could lose and probably would. She had accepted that. What she wanted, at a minimum, was to make the Republicans suffer for their victory.... 'If you want to inflict pain upon our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body,' she promised on the floor in February. 'People are like, "Is she threatening us?" Let me be clear. Yes, I am. I am threatening you.'"

 
From "'I Want the Bloody Hands Recorded'/Machaela Cavanaugh’s tear-and-rage-filled filibuster of the anti-trans bill she knew would probably pass anyway" (NY Magazine).

"We have to codify Roe v. Wade in the law, and the way to do that is to make sure the Congress votes to do that. And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights, we provide an exception for this, or an exception to the filibuster for this action."

Said President Biden, quoted in "Biden, Chiding Court, Endorses Ending Filibuster to Codify Abortion Rights/The president called the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade 'destabilizing' and said Congress needed to act to codify it into law" (NYT).

It was only the second time Mr. Biden has urged Congress to scrap its rules on the filibuster. In January, he called on lawmakers to make an exception to pass legislation to add voting rights protections. Speaking at a news conference in Madrid... Mr. Biden lamented the impact of the court’s decision on a woman’s right to have an abortion, calling Roe a “critical, critical piece.”

A critical, critical piece of what? I'm sure he left it hanging. The NYT would not edit him into less articulateness. Here's the full statement at the White House website: "Remarks by President Biden in Press Conference/Madrid, Spain."

Ah! An entire press conference. Interestingly, Biden had already used the phrase "critical, critical." Earlier in the press conference, a NYT reporter asked him "How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay that premium for this war?" He said:

"Democrats Can Win This Fall if They Make One Key Promise... Give us the House and two more senators, and we will make Roe law in January 2023."

Writes Josh Marshall (in the NYT).

Democrats hope to make November’s midterm elections a referendum on Roe v. Wade.... But you can’t make an election into a referendum on an issue if you can’t point to anything winning the election would accomplish. To make the 2022 elections a referendum on Roe, Democrats have to put protecting Roe and abortion rights on the table. 

Here’s one way to do that: get clear public commitments from every Senate Democrat (and candidate for Senate) not only to vote for the Roe bill in January 2023 but also to change the filibuster rules to ensure that a majority vote would actually pass the bill and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.... 

If... there are 48 Senate Democrats ready to make that pledge... That is, all current Democratic Senators except Manchin and Sinema. they need two additional Democratic senators in the next Congress.

There needs to be a specific commitment to an explicit statutory text and to changing the filibuster rule.

No ambiguity, no haggling, no living in Senator Manchin’s head for a year. You give us this, and we’ll give you that. That tells voters exactly what will be delivered with a Democratic win. It also defines what constitutes a win: control of the House and two more Senate seats.

I don't know if that strong position would win them the majority they'd need to follow through. What if their commitment to ending the filibuster ends up inspiring Republicans — if Republicans, as predicted, take the majority — to end the filibuster and pass some things they like — including anti-abortion legislation?

"Sinema reiterates opposition to eliminating filibuster, probably dooming Democrats’ voting rights push."

WaPo reports.

And:

[T]he circumstances in which she reiterated it — as Senate Democratic leaders prepared to launch a decisive floor debate and less than an hour before President Biden was scheduled to arrive on Capitol Hill to deliver a final, forceful appeal for action — put an exclamation point on her party’s long and fruitless effort to counter restrictive Republican-passed state voting laws.

We're told that she wore "purple, a symbol of Washington bipartisanship." There's always interest in what this Senator is wearing. So here — you can look at her as she stands in the breach:

"You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’re just seeing, a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure, pure demagoguery."

"A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power." 

Said Mitch McConnell, quoted in "McConnell rips Biden’s voting rights speech as ‘profoundly unpresidential’" (NY Post). 

I didn't watch Biden's speech — I can read the transcript — but I did overhear it, and I said out loud, What is he yelling about? Why is he scolding us? He's using a ridiculous "tough guy" voice. 

You can criticize me for not attending to the substance, but he wasn't trying to use substance. He was using emotive sound effects. It was like a Trump rally — but no. A Trump rally would have humor and fun. 

And I don't think Trump ever relied on the argument that you're a racist if you don't agree with him. The anti-Trump rejoinder: Trump never called his opponents racists, because his between-the-lines message was always come all you racists and follow me. 

"Bringing a child into this nightmare world. This should require two-thirds, too. If you want to feel maternal, you can care for my plant, Fernie Sanders."

So reads one punchline in a New Yorker humor piece, "The Filibuster Belongs in my Group Chat, Not the Senate." 

There are 3 authors for this short piece. Speaking of group chats, this is group humor. The authors are Ginny Hogan, Alex Connolly, and Katy Fishell. That might be 3 women, but I don't know. 

Also on the list of individual decisions the friends as a group control with a filibuster:

Hosting a destination wedding. This should be constitutional-amendment rare—so, like, two-thirds to bring a vote.....

Is the humor in agreeing with the notion that other people are making bad decision in this area or is it in thinking that friends who want tight control over their friends' decisions are horrible? Or is it funny because you can't really tell? Alternative position: It's not funny. 

I do think the hostility toward destination weddings is real, but the intrusion into decisions whether to bear a child must be intended to reflect badly on the proposal to subject it to a filibuster. I note that the filibuster is set up to make it harder to choose to go through with a pregnancy. There's an implication of forced abortion! The proposal is not to subject a decision to get an abortion to the filibuster. 

I know, I'm ruining all the humor. I can do that all on my own.

Even though there's no reference to women in that humor piece, it's clearly about the way women feel about other women and how much they desire to control them and how their go-to technique is to weaponize their need to be part of a group.

"If The New Yorker is going to make gaffes like 'deadbeat,' I'm going to have a lot more trouble going along with things like 'lambent.'"

I'm quoting something I just wrote because I want to let you know there's a big new addition to this post from yesterday.

Also: "There's a part of me that wants to admire the writer's way with words and a part of me that's about to blurt — to paraphrase George W. Bush — What the fuck are you talking about, lambent?"

That link about Bush goes back to a post I wrote in May 2004, when this blog was 4 months old and William Safire was still writing "On Language" columns in the NYT.  Oddly enough, Safire was talking about a passage in the new Bob Woodward book. 

Some things pass away and some things stay the same. From Safire:

"The Homeland Security bill was being blocked in the Senate by a filibuster,'' writes Woodward. ''Calio told the president that they were about to 'vitiate' the filibuster."

George Bush's reaction —"What the f**k are you talking about, vitiate?" — was the first time I'd written "fuck" on this blog, albeit with asterisks. I was puritanical about it, saying it was a word "which I ordinarily never write, but consider importantly quotable in this context." Ha ha.

IN THE COMMENTS: 

Deevs said:

Lambent. A word I learned from playing the Gears of War video game over ten years ago. Maybe that's also where the New Yorker writer learned the word, and his pretentiousness is actually a demonstration of his own low-brow hobbies, past or present.

Aha! 

"The Lambent are mutated Locusts who have been infected by Immulsion. A yellow liquid-based parasite used as a fuel source by the Human population of Sera..."

"This more than 800-page bill has garnered zero Republican support. Why?"

"Are the very Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump because of actions that led to an attack on our democracy unwilling to support actions to strengthen our democracy? Are these same senators, whom many in my party applauded for their courage, now threats to the very democracy we seek to protect? The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen. With that in mind, some Democrats have again proposed eliminating the Senate filibuster rule in order to pass the For the People Act with only Democratic support. They’ve attempted to demonize the filibuster and conveniently ignore how it has been critical to protecting the rights of Democrats in the past.... The Senate, its processes and rules, have evolved over time to make absolute power difficult while still delivering solutions to the issues facing our country and I believe that’s the Senate’s best quality...  Do we really want to live in an America where one party can dictate and demand everything and anything it wants, whenever it wants?"

From "Joe Manchin: Why I'm voting against the For the People Act."

Thanks, Joe. You have garnered my respect.

ADDED: No More Mr. Nice Blog writes:

If you're concerned that criticizing him for this could inspire him to switch parties and throw full Senate control to the Republicans, don't worry. He'll never do that.

So... that concern is out there. 

"We’re glad Senator McConnell threw in the towel and gave up on his ridiculous demand. We look forward to organizing the Senate under Democratic control and start getting big, bold things done for the American people."

Said Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, quoted in "McConnell Relents in First Filibuster Skirmish, but the War Rages On/Senator Mitch McConnell dropped his demand that Democrats promise to preserve the procedural weapon that can grind the Senate to a halt, but with President Biden’s agenda in the balance, the fight is not over" (NYT).

Senator Mitch McConnell... had refused to agree to a plan for organizing the chamber without a pledge from Democrats to protect the filibuster, a condition that Mr. Schumer had rejected. But late Monday, as the stalemate persisted, Mr. McConnell found a way out by pointing to statements by two centrist Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, that said they opposed getting rid of the procedural tool — a position they had held for months — as enough of a guarantee to move forward without a formal promise from Mr. Schumer.... 

As they press forward on Mr. Biden’s agenda, Democrats will come under mounting pressure from activists to jettison the rule....  “I feel pretty damn strongly, but I will also tell you this: I am here to get things done,” said Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana. “If all that happens is filibuster after filibuster, roadblock after roadblock, then my opinion may change.”...

We were just talking about Tester. Remember? He's the Senator who brings his own meat to Washington and wants to "get shit done."

Democrats say they must retain at least the threat that they could one day end the filibuster, arguing that bowing to Mr. McConnell’s demand now would only have emboldened Republicans to deploy it constantly, without fear of retaliation. “Well that’s a nonstarter because if we gave him that, then the filibuster would be on everything, every day,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press."  

Ah! That makes the most sense of it all. Democrats want the threat of abolishing the filibuster, and Republicans are moderated by the threat alone. Notice that actually to change the rule would require every single Democratic Senator to agree and a tiebreaker vote from Kamala Harris would still be needed. That's a lot of cohesion. 

Kyrsten Sinema is up for reelection in 2024, and she took over a seat that had been held by a Republican. The other Democratic Senator who faces reelection in 2024 and who beat a Republican incumbent in 2018 is Jacky Rosen. We don't hear much from her. As for Manchin, he's been in the Senate longer — since 2011, after the seat was vacated by the death of the Democrat/Klansman Robert Byrd (a historic filibusterer) — but Manchin too is up for reelection in 2024, and I think McConnell knows he can count on Manchin not to vote against the filibuster. 

"4 Pinocchios for Obama’s claim that Republicans have ‘filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation.'"

From WaPo's Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler.

On just about every level, this claim is ridiculous.

We realize that Senate rules are complex and difficult to understand, but the president did serve in the Senate and should be familiar with its terms and procedures. Looking at the numbers, he might have been able to make a case that Republicans have blocked about 50 bills that he had wanted passed, such as an increase in the minimum wage. But instead he inflated the numbers to such an extent that he even included votes in which he, as senator, supported a filibuster.

"Unlike the challenge to the individual insurance mandate, Halbig v. Sebelius involves no great questions of constitutional interpretation."

"The plaintiffs are merely asking the judges to tell the Administration to faithfully execute the plain language of the statute that Congress passed and President Obama signed."

Federal judge Paul Friedman, a Clinton appointee, ruled in favor of the Administration in January. But the three-judge D.C. Circuit panel may be another story. It includes Judges Thomas Griffith (a George W. Bush nominee), A. Raymond Randolph (George H.W. Bush) and Harry Edwards (Jimmy Carter). The fear of an adverse panel ruling is one reason that Senate Democrats broke the filibuster rule to pack the D.C. Circuit with three more liberals this year. If the Administration loses at the panel level, it will ask for an en banc ruling that it thinks it will win and thus delay any Supreme Court judgment by many months.

"The Senate was headed into another all-nighter Monday evening as 26 Democrats who call themselves the 'climate caucus'..."

"... planned to speak nonstop about climate change from about 6:30 p.m. until 9 a.m. Tuesday."

“It’s aimed towards the day when something more concrete can be legislated,” said Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, a veteran of climate and clean-energy policy battles....

Climate change legislation — which would most likely place a price on carbon pollution — could raise gasoline and electricity costs, which would be deeply unpopular with voters. 

That last sentence is the second-to-the-last sentence in the linked article, which is in The New York Times. The last sentence contains the phrases "fossil fuel industry" and "libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch" and "spend heavily to block."

"Centrists Should Mourn the Demise of the Filibuster: Only the extremists win—and in the end, mostly the Republicans."

A Slate headline, quoted in its entirety at Instapundit, as if he's not seeing the snark.

To see the snark, examine the logic

1. After the filibuster, only the extremists will win.

2. Most of the winners will be Republicans.

3. [Unstated.] Most of the extremists are Republicans. 

What counts as "extremism"? In this context, it has to do with how we think about judges. (And executive nominees, but I'll leave them to the side for simplicity's sake.) The "extreme" should be understood as the more ideologically slanted or threateningly powerful individuals that the President would otherwise have refrained from nominating. But even with the minority party disabled by the inability to filibuster, there are political constraints.

Obama can't just nominate, say, Bill Ayers.

There are 242 pending nominees to ram through after the end of the filibuster.

But what are the priorities and the politics of this drastic effort?

Top priorities for the White House include the confirmation in December of Jeh Johnson as secretary of homeland security, Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve, according to a White House official. Obama also hopes for quick confirmation of three nominees to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit....

And then?

“There is no document; there is no blueprint,” said Robert Raben, a prominent Democratic lawyer close to the White House. “In terms of a strategy, everybody’s blinking really hard.”

I guess "blinking really hard" means it was such a big surprise that they're still trying to wake up into the new reality. Or do you think it's blinking in the sense of losing one's nerve? They looked courageous, but then they blinked?

"One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end. The Senate must do what is good, what is right, what is reasonable and what is honorable."

"This filibuster is nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority," said the Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, in a speech to the Federalist Society in November 2004.

"Republicans, wounded and eager to show they have not been stripped of all power, are far more likely to unify against the Democrats who humiliated them in such dramatic fashion."

In the NYT, Jonathan Weisman assesses post-filibuster politics, under the headline "Partisan Fever in Senate Likely to Rise."

Republican senators who were willing to team with Democrats on legislation like an immigration overhaul, farm policy and a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act will probably think twice in the future....

Please, Republicans, please be obstructionist. I hear the secret thoughts of the NYT. Go big-time obstructionistic on things that will leverage Democrats next year to say that you hate the Hispanic people and you're at war against women. 

It's the Democrats who are beaten up right now, who need a boost in the midst of the Obamacare debacle. But the NYT is here to tell you that yesterday Democrats "humiliated" Republicans in "such dramatic fashion." The Democrats are desperate to change the subject back to how terrible Republicans are, and the NYT is here to help. The Democrats go "nuclear" on the old Senate tradition, and the NYT stresses the dramatic humiliation of the Republicans.

David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said retaliation by Republicans against the president’s broader agenda would end up hurting them more than Democrats. 

Well, of course, it's his assignment to say why whatever happens is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. You can try to make up the argument for yourself before reading it.

"Democrats, who filibustered their own share of Republican judicial nominees before they took control of the Senate..."

"... have said that what the minority party has done is to effectively rewrite the law by requiring a 60-vote supermajority threshold for high-level presidential appointments. Once rare, filibusters of high-level nominees are now routine."

Harry Reid moves to end the filibuster for judicial nominees. [UPDATE: They did it!]

Short term: What a flood of new judges we will have! Long term: The American people will see what sort of judges Obama and the Senate majority installs, the GOP will highlight their "left-wing activism" (or whatever it might be called), the American people will respond (perhaps becoming alarmed), a Republican President will (sooner or later) be elected, he or she will feel fully empowered to pick excitingly conservative judges (the Bork kind, not the bland kind), Democrats will rail against their "right-wing activism," the American people will respond (taking sides between the conservative and liberal activist judges and the role of the judiciary in our democracy), and who knows what will happen in the next presidential election and the one after that and after that?

Think about how that long-term game will play out and answer this poll:

Long term, what will be the effect on the American political mind?
	Aversion to right-wing activism will lead to a preference for more liberal judges.
	Aversion to left-wing activism will lead to a preference for more conservative judges.
	Aversion to judicial activism will lead to a preference for blander, more restrained judges.
	Enthusiasm for exciting judges will lead to a preference for better, more interesting judges.
	Enthusiasm for exciting liberal judges will lead to a preference for more of them.
	Enthusiasm for exciting conservative judges will lead to a preference for more of them.
pollcode.com free polls

"In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil..."

"... it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube."

That's the quote from "Atlas Shrugged" that Ted Cruz read on the Senate floor during his (it's not a) filibuster. We talked about it here, and it sprang to mind this morning as I was reading Rich Lowry's column "Stubborn democrats escaping all the blame in shutdown":

The unintended "absurdity" theme.

After posting that last post, I saw I'd done 2 posts in a row with "absurdity" in the title. That more or less determines that I will at least do a Google "news" search on the word in an effort to make some sense of the coincidence. Perhaps everything is coming together today over absurdity.

I see there are over 3000 current news articles on congressional absurdity, and I decline to click on things like "The Double Absurdity of Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster.'" I also don't care about "The love for fantastic absurdity at the [Boston Symphony Orchestra]" or "The Sheer Absurdity of Favoring Eli Manning Over Peyton Manning."

But I'm motivated to click on "The absurdity of education" in the Saudi Gazette (comparing a British girls' school with 2 teachers and 8 students to a Saudi girls' school with 600 students and 50 teachers and no working bathrooms).

And then there's "2013 Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate absurdity and science," including:

Safety/Engineering Prize: The late Gustano Pizzo, for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to Earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, anti-hijacking system for aircraft, May 1972.

And:

Peace Prize: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. The audience was asked not to applaud and were given a demonstration of one-handed clapping.

All those commenters who wanted me to read "The Fountainhead."

All I did was buy the ebook "Atlas Shrugged" so I could blog about things Ted Cruz — "Political anarchist or genius?" — said in his (not a) filibuster yesterday. Having riffed on and sniffed at some bloody metaphors in the Ayn Rand tome, I was beset with comments telling me the Ayn Rand book I really must read is "The Fountainhead."

Surfed started it:

The Fountainhead was a better read, a more cogent and focused book and you get the same dose of the philosophy....

Addendum: In the movie Dirty Dancing (1987) Baby confronts Robbie to pay for Penny's abortion. Robbie refuses to take responsibility and preaches “Some people count and some people don’t” and then hands Baby a used paperback copy of The Fountainhead saying, “Read it. I think it's a book you'll enjoy, but make sure you return it; I have notes in the margin."