Opinion

‘Nuclear’ games

Join me, won’t you, in conjuring up those misty water-colored memories of the halcyon days of 2005 — that prehistoric moment before e-mail came tagged with “sent from my iPad,” when Justin Bieber had an age-appropriate voice and when 90 percent of the people who would vote for Barack Obama three years later had yet to learn of his existence.

Among the 10 percent who’d heard of Obama back then, there was a major frenzy, over something alternately called the “constitutional option” (if you liked it) or the “nuclear option” (if you didn’t, or wanted to scare people who didn’t).

Republicans were enraged by the way Democrats were taking advantage of arcane Senate traditions to bottle up conservative judicial nominees. Some in the GOP decided it was time to rewrite the rules, which (in one line of thinking) could be done through a simple majority vote. Republicans then had a 55-45 margin in the Senate.

The “nuclear option” they sought would have ended the rule that required a vote of 60 senators to “close debate” on a nomination and instead give that nominee a straight up-or-down majority vote. In other words, it would basically have destroyed (for confirmations) the Senate trick called the “filibuster.”

But that would’ve constituted a momentous change in the way the Senate does business. For two centuries, the Senate has served as Washington’s primary means of deceleration — the sticking point, the speed bump, the place where full-throttle ambition for change encounters grinding resistance. What’s more, ending a long tradition to solve an immediate political problem would’ve created a new kind of chaos in Washington.

In the end, a coalition of 14 senators that included John McCain and Joseph Lieberman made a deal that pertained to the controversial judicial nominees alone, and the issue died out.

But not before some powerful voices screamed about the horror of it all. One such voice dubbed the nuclear option “an unprecedented abuse of power.” He continued: “Today, we say to the American people: If you believe in liberty and in limited government, set aside your partisan views and oppose this arrogant abuse of power.”

That man was Harry Reid of Nevada, then the Senate minority leader. Now he’s the Senate ma jority leader — with a reduced Democratic majority and a resurgent Republican minority to contend with.

And it appears Reid’s troops want to . . . launch the nuclear option. Every returning Democratic senator co-signed a letter to Reid complaining that GOP obstructions of Democratic legislation are — hey, here’s a familiar word — “abuses.”

“We believe the current abuse of the rules by the minority threatens the ability of the Senate to do the necessary work of the nation, and we urge you to take steps to bring these abuses of our rules to an end,” they wrote.

Standing firmly opposed to any such effort is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “For two years, Democrats in Congress have hoped their large majorities would make it easy for them to pass extremely partisan legislation,” he wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post. “Now that they’ve lost an election, they’ve decided to change the rules rather than change their behavior.”

But in 2005, as the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, McConnell supported it; his office stated: “Sen. McConnell always has and continues to fully support the use of what has become known as the constitutional option in order to restore the norms and traditions of the Senate.”

Democrats say Republicans have used filibustering in an unprecedented fashion; McConnell says Reid has used unprecedented tactics to make it impossible for Republicans to offer amendments to Democratic bills and is therefore responsible for the increased number of filibusters.

The problem for all the senators now playing these games is that in 2005 — you know, before the Huffington Post and Facebook and Twitter — ordinary people weren’t actually paying all that much attention to what Washington politicians were doing procedurally.

That is no longer the case. There are now millions upon millions of people tweeting and iPhone-filming and status-updating. All that real-time information-watching will leave residues, shadows, chalk outlines of ideological and political crimes against the simple truth.

And the stark, rank, almost unbelievable hypocrisy on display here poses a real danger to any politician, Democrat or Republican, who dares to engage in it. This isn’t 2005 anymore.

john.podhoretz@gmail.com