The Junior League of Hezbollah

Imagine the sanctimonious outrage we would have seen from Senate Republicans if the Democrats had filibustered a George W. (I'm a War President) Bush choice for Secretary of Defense while troops were still deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their patriotism wouldn't just have been questioned; it would have been flatly denied. Face it, they would have been called traitors.

Well I'm not happy about it but, if Bush was a war president, so is Obama. But the Senate Republicans really are shameless in their prevention of a confirmation vote. The last I heard, they were saying it wasn't a filibuster, but they're clearly invoking a procedural manipulation that requires 60 votes to overcome. If it walks like a duck, etc.

I don't know if I agree with Hendrik Hertzberg's assertion in a recent New Yorker that the filibuster is unconstitutional, because it seems to me like another instance where our glorious constitution, like the even more sanctified bible, provides conflicting guidelines. But Hertzberg shows that two of the founders who didn't agree on many things, both thought that a requirement for more than simple majorities in situations other than those specified in the constitution were bad ideas.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist paper 22, said of the idea of a super majority:

its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.

James Madison, in Federalist paper 58 concurred:

In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.

The following is an old story now, and I don't know how much it has been covered:

On Februray 6th, Dan Friedman, a reporter for the New York Daily News called a Republican Senate aide to ask, with a humerous intent, if Hagel's critics had any interesting news about groups he might have addressed, like for instance, Friend of Hamas or the Junior League of Hezbollah?

A day or two later, Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com wrote a story that began:

Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons...Hagel has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called 'Friends of Hamas.'

Despite the fact that the simplest attempt to verify the allegation would have raised questions about the accuracy of the charge, apparently Shapiro and Breitbart.com continue to deny they made a serious mistake and are even attacking anyone who suggests they did. After all, they just reported accurately what a senate source told them exclusively.

The New Yorker and the Daily Beast both have interesting stories about this debacle.