What If and the "Nuclear Option"

Mullah Frist seems to be ready to go where no Senate has gone before and unleash the "Nuclear Option" for judicial appointments. The likes of John McCain, Bob Dole and George Will have warned that this is a bad precedence as the Republicans will someday be the minority party themselves. Bilmon tells us he originally thought Frist and company thought that this attack on century old Senate rules was safe because the Republicans didn't plan to ever be the minority party again. He now has another thought which I think may be closer to the truth.

But I overlooked another possibility, which is that the Republican elites are simply be following their own blind instincts for power -- and haven't given much thought to the future consequences, one way or the other.

In other words, Frist and DeLay and the rest of the Rove gang may not have any kind of grand design for a GOP Thousand Year Reich, but rather may be acting like the Easter Islander I talked about in an earlier post -- the one who cut down the last remaining tree on the island.

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond recalled how one of his students wondered what was going through the guy's mind as he completed the disasterous destruction of such a vital natural resource. My guess is that he wasn't thinking about much of anything -- except maybe what he was going to eat for lunch, or whether he was gonna get laid that night, or how much his feet hurt.

People don't usually think in grand, apocalyptic terms, even when they're doing grand, apocalyptic things. And that's probably as true for a redneck bug catcher from Texas and a genealogy-obsessed doctor from Tennessee as it is for a 13th century Polynesian lumberjack.

At least I hope so, because it's not nearly as scary as thinking the GOP high command actually does have a carefully conceived plan for total partisan domination -- of which breaking the filibuster is only the latest step.

It has appeared recently that DeLay, Frist and company are not thinking past keeping the lunatic fringe of the religious right happy through November of 2006. Of course in doing that they are alienating the other 60% of their base and even a 5% defection in 2006 will result in large loses.