In the wake of yesterday's extremely disappointing election in Massachusetts, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Democrats had somehow lost control of the Senate.  In fact, the Democrats still have an 18 vote majority--an enormous power base in a legislative chamber with only 100 seats.

Former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger points out that on Supreme Court nominations, President Obama has a majority that most presidents would envy:

President George H. W. Bush had only 43 Republican Senators when he nominated Judge Clarence Thomas – undoubtedly the most conservative nominee of the past half-century – to the Supreme Court. That’s right: 43 Senators of his party. In the end, Justice Thomas was confirmed 52 to 48. The nomination was not remotely close to having enough Senators to prevail on a cloture vote – that would have required all 43 Republicans, joined by 17 Democrats. But he was confirmed because the settled expectation was that the President and the country are entitled to have an up or down vote on a matter such as a Supreme Court nomination. A filibuster that prevented such a vote was politically unthinkable.

And if there aren't 60 votes in favor of a particular issue or nominee?  Let them filibuster.  After a while, voters might start wondering why it is that 41 senators won't allow a vote on legislation with clear majority support.

You might have read the recent news about Joe Lieberman’s efforts to block meaningful health care reform. It’s no longer surprising that Senator Lieberman is doing everything he can to slow down or stop reform, but it might be surprising to know that his efforts have been opposed by . . . Joe Lieberman.

Yes, just a few years ago, Senator Joe Lieberman testified in support of legislation offered by Senator Joe Lieberman to stop the kind of maneuvering that Senator Joe Lieberman is doing right now.

In late 1994, I joined Senator Harkin in launching an effort to encourage Senate discussion of reforming the Senate's cloture rule. Like Senator Harkin, I had become increasingly frustrated at the way the Senate's cloture rule repeatedly allowed a minority of Members to prevent the Senate's majority from enacting legislation. I felt--and continue to feel--that the Senate rules should be changed to prevent a small minority of Senators from bringing legislation to a halt simply by saying that they will never end debate. Senator Harkin and I therefore offered a proposal under which an initial cloture vote would require 60 votes, but the requisite number to reach cloture would decline by three with each of the next three cloture attempts on the same matter. As of the fourth cloture vote, 51 votes--a simple majority--would suffice to invoke cloture.

Yes, Senator Lieberman was deeply concerned by abuse of the filibuster. But apparently times have changed. Since Democratic activists booted him from the party, Senator Lieberman has reversed himself on any number of major issues for no discernable reason beyond political expediency. (NB: This is what Senator John McCain calls “principle.”)

Check out this classic piece by Rachel Maddow, illustrating how far the Republicans are willing to go as the Party of No.

According to the Daily Beast, the GOP is threatening to filibuster President Obama’s legal nominees if he moves to release the infamous “torture memos” that came out of the John Yoo-era Office of Legal Counsel:

A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

It was bad enough that George W. Bush spent the last eight years politicizing the Department of Justice and degrading the rule of law. Now, instead of working with the new administration to clean up the DOJ, Republican Senators are apparently doubling down and desperately attempting to cover up the Bush Administration’s misdeeds and their own complicity.

As several of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said during the Committee’s vote on Dawn Johnsen’s nomination: bring it on. If the GOP wants a public debate about what’s been going in on the Justice Department, that’s the kind of debate the American people will understand.

In the mean time, now would be a good time to remind every member of the U.S. Senate, Democrat and Republican alike, that it’s time to confirm Dawn Johnsen and clean up the DOJ.

People For the American Way president Kathryn Kolbert appeared recently on the David Bender Show on Air America to talk about President Obama’s judicial nominees.

As weeks go, I think this has been a fascinating look at the Republican obstruction machine – and how willing they are to play politics with our future.

First, the Republicans fumed and fumed about the omnibus appropriations bill, as President Obama explained, last year’s undone business that had to be taken care of to move on to the urgent problems facing us. They held it up over the weekend, forced votes on a whole bunch of amendments this week that they knew wouldn’t pass just so they could try to play “gotcha” with the Democrats and then passed the bill on a voice vote. So much for principled opposition! 

Then they fumed and fumed about how horrid David Ogden was – this is President Obama’s and Attorney General Holder’s eminently qualified choice to be the second in line at the Justice Department.  They wrung their hands about “hard left radicals” who have endorsed Ogden, such as the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the National District Attorneys Association.  The Republicans slow-walked the nomination through Committee and then threatened a filibuster in the full Senate, but couldn’t muster the votes.  The right-wing Family Research Council said they’d “score” the vote in an effort to hold senators accountable for the dastardly act of voting for Ogden and then today he was voted on by the full Senate and received a resounding 65-28 vote! Clearly the final result was not in doubt.

So what were these histrionics about?  And how long can they justify playing politics with America's future?

Great editorial in New York Times this morning recognizing the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans threatening to filibuster President Obama's judicial nominees well before any are named and urging Senator Leahy to let the blue slip process -- under which senators get a way to block judicial nominees from their home state -- die quietly. The editorial very eloquently echoes some of the most important points People For the American Way has been making for weeks, and it is definitely worth reading.

When President George W. Bush was stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues, Senate Republicans threatened to change the august body's rules if any Democrat dared to try to block his choices, even the least-competent, most-radical ones. Filibustering the president's nominees, they said, would be an outrageous abuse of senatorial privilege.

Now that President Obama is preparing to fill vacancies on federal benches, Republican senators have fired off an intemperate letter threatening -- you got it -- filibusters if Mr. Obama's nominees are not to their liking. Mr. Obama should not let the Republicans' saber-rattling interfere with how he chooses judges.

Read the whole article.