Editorial: Reid fighting the good fight

Wednesday, May 18, 2005 | 9:32 a.m.

How do you compromise with a broken record? That's what Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has been up against during the past few weeks in trying to work out a deal with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. The issue has been the Senate rule allowing the use of the filibuster to block presidential judicial nominees. "A fair up-or-down vote," Frist stated at the outset of the compromise talks. "A fair up-or-down vote," Frist stated as the talks progressed. "A fair up-or-down vote," Frist said Tuesday as the "negotiations" with Reid collapsed.

Reid's experience shows how difficult it is to achieve a dialogue with an ideologue. Frist is so arrogantly sure of his party's ideology that he is willing to undo a Senate rule in place to prevent the majority party from assuming total control over presidential judicial nominations. The rule allows the minority party to filibuster, meaning that senators can take the floor and talk ceaselessly, effectively preventing a vote from coming to the floor. This allows voters in the minority senators' districts to be represented, too. A filibuster is effective because it takes 60 votes to cut it off.

But Frist and his masters in the White House want to change the rule so that filibustering is not allowed on votes concerning judicial nominees. If a filibuster starts, he has vowed to use the "nuclear option." This means that the Senate's presiding officer, presumably Vice President Dick Cheney, who is president of the Senate, will be asked by a Republican senator to rule the filibuster out of order. Once the ruling is made, all it would take is 51 votes -- a simple majority -- for the ruling to be upheld and to be binding. With 55 of the 100 senators Republican, Frist is confident that he would get the votes.

The whole fight, which is beginning in earnest this week, is over just seven of Bush's judicial nominations -- out of more than 200 -- that Democrats have blocked because they hold extreme right-wing views. In our view, this issue is a prime example of why the filibuster rule should not be changed. The Republicans are demonstrating exactly what would happen if the majority party gets total control. The country would be run its way, no searching for common ground.

Reid has our strong support in continuing his fight against the Republican ideologues in the Senate. Emasculating the minority party is tantamount to giving the president and just a few members of the Senate sole power to fill U.S. Supreme Court seats and other federal judgships. Or, in other words, to change how the the country is governed to fit their own radical views.