14 Senate "moderates" stared into the abyss and flinched. I had anticipated that some sort of accomodation like this would arise before the final showdown and I was not disappointed in that respect. What is disappointing, and is going unnoticed by most casual observers, is how bad a deal this is for just about everyone involved.
The Republican leadership, specifically Senator Frist, loses because they had the power to get everything they wanted and they gave in to the "obstructionist" Democrats. Frist now appears like a Majority leader who couldn't keep his troops in line, and had his power pulled out from under him. Time will tell if this cripples him permanently, but it seems sure that his 2008 Presidential bid will soon be referred to as his aborted 2008 Presidential bid...
Senator Reid is another big loser, since he played the politics of incalcitrance and obstructionism, and was shown to be tactically erroneous in doing so. What's the point of making such a big point of drawing a line in the sand and making a stand if your troops outflank you and compromise with the enemy? Maybe in a few years the actions of the Minority leader will be shown to have been correct, but at this moment he appears to be an inneffectual leader.
Another loser is, as a group, American liberals. The deal struck will allow Justice Brown to get a seat on the Fedaral bench unimpeded, which will pretty much make her a lock for Associate Justice O'Conner's seat when she steps down in a couple of years. Since Senate Democrats allowed Brown a position in the Federal judiciary now, they can't very well say she's unqualified later, now can they? This will essentially replace a Supreme Court moderate with a hard-right ideologue, the exact thing Democrats were trying to avoid in the first place.
I guess the winners are the group of Senate moderates. As the Boston Globe piece I posted yesterday indicates, this group is fully poised to occupy the power vacuum opened up by the unwillingness of their more ideologically driven colleagues on either side of the aisle to seize power and use it, rather than seizing rhetoric and flailing it about.
