Roll Over and Die Already

That the Democratic faction in the Senate decided to passively acquiesce and concede to the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court without a fight is shocking and at the same time not surprising at all. While it seemed to be a matter of debate whether or not a filibuster could have succeeded at all, the message Democrats are sending is that they have accepted defeat without even trying to articulate their dissent in any forceful, meaningful terms.

Ours is a nation whose present government is rotten and corrupt. While the Executive Branch uses its "privilege" to scuttle the many pictures our commander in chief took with Jack Abramoff, and deny Congressional subcommittees access to communications regarding Hurricane Katrina, it insists that it is perfectly acceptable to ignore the rule of law and invade the privacy of American citizens as it sees fit. Ethics investigations and criminal trials cast dark shadows over the omnipresent flags. Serious investigations by reputable scholars like Mark Crispin Miller and Vincent Bugliosi have shown that both of the last two presidential elections were fraudulent, and cronyism runs rampant in Washington faster than the makers of body bags can keep up with.

Enter the Democratic faction and its "strategy" to counter the Republican faction's stranglehold on power. Roll over and play dead. A variety of reasons were listed for the decision not to filibuster Sam Alito's nomination, but the majority rang of the same note: it simply wouldn't succeed. Simply put, the Democratic faction would rather be passive witness to the undoing of democratic freedoms than articulate its beliefs against such developments, on the grounds that a failed filibuster would make the Democratic faction "look bad." This is the same sort of weak reasoning that makes the Republican faction so successful. Democrats simply hand over victory without offering any substantial resistance, for fear of looking radical, extreme, or even "too liberal." It's reminiscient of football post-game interviews where the losing players lament that "they beat themselves."

In the movie "The Molly Maguires," Jack Kehoe (played by Sean Connery) complains that his mentor Dan Raines died "without so much as making a sound," and insists that unlike Mr. Raines, he wouldn't die quietly. Despite its misguided violence, the Molly Maguires' cause was a righteous one (and a poignant one, given the spate of recent mine disasters due to deregulation), but even Jack Kehoe knew it wasn't going to be a successful one. The difference between them and the Democrats is that at least they tried to make a difference; at least they made everyone in earshot listen to their protests for a brief moment before they swung from the gallows. It's a shame that the Democrats couldn't have taken some inspiration from that story, used the filibuster as the Molly Maguires used their "powder" and at least went down with some fire on their tongues.