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Shocking L.A. Times Editorial!

by John F. Tamburo, Editor in Chief, Publisher
Originally Posted: 5/25/2005 11:13:59 AM

Thanks to our hero Rush Limbaugh, I have been alerted to an editorial in the normally-liberal Los Angeles Times.  Entitled Alas, a Nuclear Freeze, one would think that the Times had taken to its editorial page to laud the Senate for achieving a compromise that would, for now, preserve the rights of liberals to throw an unconstitutional wrench into the works when it comes to our President’s judicial nominees.  Well, you would be wrong, and this is a wonderful thing.

On May 24, the Times ran this editorial that decried the compromise as "essentially a reactionary tool that unduly empowers obstructionist minorities."  Yes!  Consistency.  As we have constantly noted, liberals decried the filibuster when it was used against them.  Timothy Noah’s piece in Slate entitled Abolish the Filibuster! is but one example.  It is heartening to see that at least some liberals are consistent in their belief sets.  It gives us hope that the country may not, if the leftists ever regain power, flush all traces of our goodness right out of the bowl.

"Many Democrats, meanwhile, came to realize that the filibuster is one of the shining jewels of American democracy only when they were in the minority."  How true.  Isn’t this Conservativity Echo Syndrome?  I have repeatedly made this point in this webzine.  Robert Byrd (D-Ku Klux Klan), one of the "centrist" bloc that made this "memorandum of understanding," used to be majority leader of the Senate, and at one time, this racist was President Pro Tempore of the Senate, placing him third in line to succeed the President!  He repeatedly used a virtually identical tactic to the Nuclear Option to ram through rules changes over the objections of the GOP minority.  However, in true liberal philosophy, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander; only the liberals have the right to filibuster when in the minority.

"Due to its disproportional representation — California (population 36 million) and Delaware (population 830,000) each get two senators — minority rights are already well protected in the Senate. The filibuster, as an additional brake on democracy that goes beyond the constitutional framework to give individual senators even more power, should have been nuked for all purposes, not just in the context of judicial nominees."  Yes!  Hurrah!  I have said exactly the same thing many times over the last months.

"In the Senate, business as usual too often amounts to delay and obstruction, and the chief enabler in this process is the filibuster."  The people have spoken loudly of their distaste and disgust when it comes to obstructionism.  The Los Angeles Times has, in this case, sided with consistency, reason and the people.  I congratulate the editors of this newspaper.