To nuke or not to nuke

That is the question. George Will comes down on the side of Peace Through Superior Firepower: Fight it out in the 2006 elections and put 60 Republicans in the Senate to defeat the Democrats' filibusters of President Bush's appeals court nominations.

The red-meat grass roots and all but a couple of sitting Republican senators prefer to detonate the Doomsday Machine. And unlike their Strangelovian counterparts, Republicans did tell the Democrats about it. Now there seems to be an automatic trigger, the first cloture vote that fails.

We pick up the dialog as the situation is considered in the War Room:

REID: Where is this ... thing?

FRIST: It is buried in the Senate Rules.

REID: Do you mean to say you'd set it off in your own party?

FRIST: Naturally. It would kill us just as surely even if we set it off in your party. But this way we know it's safe, and we don't have the problem of a super-majority to pass it.

SCHUMER: Sen. Reid, I can't buy this malarkey. They wouldn't set the damn thing off. Why should they?

FRIST: You're absolutely right. We wouldn't. No sane party ever would. That's why it was designed to trigger itself automatically.

SCHUMER: Then all you have to do is untrigger it.

FRIST: Ah, but if we were able to untrigger, that would be defeating its purpose. All our enemies would have to do, would be to warn us in advance that they were going to violate one of our unalterable triggering conditions. We would bluff, naturally, but in the end we would be insane not to untrigger it. Now we can say: There is no point trying to intimidate us, we don't control the Doomsday Machine.

OK, I think we've stretched that analogy as far as it'll go. For now. Consider: In the most heavily advertised presidential election in U.S. history, 60% of eligible voters went to the polls. In a typical off-year election -- in which one-third of the Senate, all of the House, about half the governors and most state legislators are up for election -- maybe 40 percent of the public jumps in the voting pool.

Why is that? Why is it that America is obsessed with a celebrity pedophile, but so few citizens are even aware of the high drama in the Senate that's now in its fifth year?

Here's my guess: Government is boring. It's so boring they've pretty much stopped teaching it in high school. It's so boring that newspapers and network TV don't really even cover it, unless President Bush says "moo-lah" or Hillary Clinton has a bad hair day.

Now wars, that's where the boffo public-policy ratings are. Members of Congress used to beat the crap out of each other. In one case, Rep. Preston Brooks, D-SC, beat Sen. Charles Sumner, R-MA, senseless with a cane during the debate over whether Kansas should be admitted as a slave or free state. It took Sumner three years to recover, but he eventually returned to the Senate. Brooks survived a censure resolution, resigned, and was immediately re-elected.

Imagine the ratings should Hatch & Schumer go at each other with cane and fire tong! Then the public would know what the fight was all about!

I've written minimally about the filibusters because 1) plenty of other sites have it covered (Confirm Them for example); and 2) while the filibusters aim to preserve loose judging, defeating them won't solve the problem of judicial activism. Democrats, in fact, are probably filibustering four or five nominess who'll turn out to be just as bad as Justices Kennedy and Souter. They (both the Democrats and the nominees) just don't know who they are yet.

But I find the face-off exciting. We need more exercise of the Constitution's lesser-used muscles. Let's have more filibusters (but of the old-fashioned sort, please). More invocations of obscure Senate rules. More constitutional amendments -- it happens so seldom it's a wonder the states still remember how to ratify. More impeachments. More fights between the branches. More name calling. The Senate should have a "Bring Your Cane to Work Day."

American democracy was once a hot-blooded and popular contact sport. Now it's a sclerotic meeting of Muffleys. George Will doesn't want to set off the Doomsday Machine ("Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"). Well here's a flash: George Will wears a bow tie. I say crank open the bomb bay and let fly the Cobalt-Thorium G.

More at Confirm Them, Musing Minds, Cold-hearted Truth, Jay Caruso, Baseball Crank, Betsy's Page, Conservative Contrarian, Blogs for Bush, Middle Earth, New World Man, National Ledger, Young Conservative, Uncorrelated, Windy City Lefty, Balloon Juice, Say Anything & Lorie Byrd (guest-blogging at Ruffini's site). The Left Coaster is predictably unhappy. New Leadership urges caution.

Professor Bainbridge has a roundup.

UPDATE 4/23/05: Jeff Goldstein thinks we should have a real filibuster first. Or Frist. Or something. I think.

UPDATE 4/25/05: Right Wing News makes a good point: The filibuster isn't equally useful to Republicans and Democrats.