One of the things that sticks in my craw so much about the current filibuster fight on the Hill is the rank hypocrisy from the Republican side of the aisle.  (Said hypocrisy, which I am about to examine, is why I'm convinced that this is an elaborate tactic for a simple power grab, and not a statement of principle.)

Why?  Because the filibuster has been used many times by the people who are now loudly fulminating against it.  Including Senator Frist, in 2000.  Senate Republicans merrily used obstructionist tactics against many judicial nominees for years.  The only difference?  Bill Clinton was President at the time. 

Let's look at what happened during the Clinton Administration, shall we?  In the National Review Online in January, Orrin Hatch described his philosophy on judicial nominees:

Focusing on President Clinton's judicial nominations in 1999, I described what has been the Senate's historical standard for judicial nominations: "Let's make our case if we have disagreement, and then vote." . . .

Along with then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, I repeatedly warned that filibustering Clinton judicial nominees would be a "travesty" and helped make sure that every Clinton judicial nomination reaching the full Senate received a final confirmation decision.

Really?  Well, that's interesting, isn't it?  Note Senator Hatch's phrasing:  "every Clinton judicial nomination reaching the full Senate."  Well, not many nominations did reach the Senate, because they got tied up in committee.  The Senate Judiciary Committee, as a matter of fact.  Which was chaired at the time by none other than...(wait for it)...Orrin Hatch.  (At one point, Hatch refused to hold any hearings for Clinton nominees for six months.)  Kind of a self-serving, hair-splitting statement, eh, Orrin?

And you know my guess as to why Democrats are threatening to filibuster the most extreme of Bush's judicial nominees?  Because it's their only option.  Under Republican control of the Senate, the rules have been dismantled.  There used to be a host of procedural tactics that Hatch et al. used to keep Clinton nominees from a full Senate vote.  They're gone now.  For fifty years, the American Bar Association had "pre-screened" judicial nominees and rated their qualifications.  The White House ended that in 2001.

For years, the Senate Judiciary Committee operated under the "blue-slip" rule:  If a single senator from the nominee's home state objected to the nomination, the nomination was dead.  The commitee used this against many Clinton nominees.  In 2001, after a conservative Republican became President, Sen. Hatch decided that it should take objections from both home-state senators to kill a nomination.  And in 2003, Hatch upped the ante even more, declaring that home-state Senators' opinions were merely advisory...even if both objected to a nomination, it would still go to the floor for a full vote.

Also:  Rule IV of the Judiciary Committee's rules states that at least one member of the minority has to agree to the nomination in order to move it out of the Judiciary Committee and send it to the Senate floor.  On February 27, 2003, Sen. Hatch ignored this rule, insisting that it did not apply to nominations.  Since then, he's said that Rule IV doesn't apply to the committee chairman.  (Go back to that link at the beginning of this graf -- Rule IV is still on the books, and its text hasn't changed.  Nevertheless, it's being violated.)  This was in direct contradiction to Hatch's ruling upholding Rule IV on November 13, 1997...but then again, it was a Clinton appointee whose nomination was under debate at the time.

Kevin Drum sums it up best.  In a WaPo op-ed from January, he writes:

These rule changes aren't a direct explanation for every Democratic filibuster. In fact, some of the filibustered judges have been approved by both of their home-state senators, so they wouldn't have been blue-slipped in any case.

But Democratic frustration is still understandable. For better or worse, the Senate has long been dominated by rules that give minorities considerable power over the legislative and appointment process. The usual justification for this is that it forces compromise and curbs extremism.

When Democrats were in the majority, Republicans defended these traditional Senate rules and used them freely to block judges they had strong objections to. But when they became the majority party themselves, they gradually decided the rules should no longer be allowed to get in the way of unbridled majority power. It was only after Democrats were left with no other way to object to activist judges that they resorted to their last remaining option: the filibuster.

And, in an entry on his own blog yesterday, Drum proposes a solution:

My broader point is that the real issue in the filibuster fight isn't the filibuster itself — or blue slips or Rule IV or any other specific rule — it's the general principle that rules shouldn't be cynically changed en masse just because your guy is in power and you've decided they're no longer convenient. As it happens, I'm not much of a fan of filibusters myself: their history has mostly been anti-liberal, and in principle I think majorities should be able to pass legislation if they can muster the votes. However, the rules shouldn't change midstream. If Republicans and Democrats could agree on a broad set of rule changes that eliminated the filibuster but didn't take effect until 2009, I'd support it. That's fair, since no one knows which party will be in control then. I'll take my chances that the Dems will win in 2008 and the rule changes will work in my favor.

Works for me.  I'm not in love with the idea, but democracy should really be about more than the party in power cynically discarding all the rules they'd used to their advantage when they were the minority.  The Republicans don't want the filibuster, and I guess -- I'm hoping -- that they don't really want to pull the trigger on the "nuclear option."  (The backlash would be sizable, it appears.)  But really, as Drum writes, "Republicans have no one but themselves to blame for the current game of nuclear chicken they find themselves in."