Senate Republicans came up with the name “nuclear option” in 2003 — and have spent the last six month trying to get the rest of us to stop using it. As Matthew Yglesias noted today, there’s yet another label in the mix.
The Weekly Standard hands down a new party line on what you’re supposed to call violating the rules of the Senate in order to eliminate the possibility of filibustering judicial nominees: “let’s call this ‘nuclear option’ by its proper name: the fairness option.”
Everyone plays these sorts of little message games, but as with Social Security
privatizationpersonalizationmodernatization, the trouble here is that conservatives want to forbid the use of words that they themselves devised to describe their agenda. It’s a little sad.
A little? By my count, the right is up to six different labels for the tactic: nuclear option, constitutional option, Byrd option, filibuster reform, “majority rules” option (recommended by John Cornyn), and now, fairness option.
The way things are going, maybe we’ll soon be able to call it the “defeated option.”