{"id":6484,"date":"2006-01-31T09:11:17","date_gmt":"2006-01-31T14:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6484"},"modified":"2006-01-31T09:11:17","modified_gmt":"2006-01-31T14:11:17","slug":"not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper\/","title":{"rendered":"Not with a bang, but a whimper?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I regret not having done more thorough coverage of the Senate “fight,” if we can call it that, over Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination yesterday, but my heart just wasn’t in it. The writing’s been on the wall for, well, several months now, so yesterday’s theatrics just weren’t as captivating as they could have been.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, the full breakdown of yesterday’s filibuster vote is online<\/a>. (The 25 senators who backed the filibuster are the “no” votes.) And now that Alito is slated for confirmation, I see the past several days as a good-news, bad-news situation.<\/p>\n

* The good news is two-dozen senators stepped up to mount aggressive opposition to Alito; the bad news is they did so in the 11th hour when it was too late.<\/p>\n

* The good news is John Kerry showed great leadership; the bad news is it emerged while he was in Switzerland and came after the outcome of the Alito debate was largely over.<\/p>\n

* The good news is 25 senators voted for the filibuster; the bad news is more than that voted to filibuster Bush’s energy bill.<\/p>\n

* The good news is senators who want to be president (Bayh, Biden, Clinton, Feingold, and Kerry) voted for the filibuster; the bad news is several red-state incumbents who are up in November (Byrd, Conrad, Johnson, Nelson ) will vote to confirm.<\/p>\n

* The good news is one Republican senator (Chafee) will vote against Alito; the bad news is he’ll likely be the only one.<\/p>\n

* The good news is Alito will get far more than the 22 Dem “no” votes John Roberts got; the bad news is Alito will be on the high court anyway.<\/p>\n

When Alito was nominated, it was supposed to set up the biggest judicial fight since Clarence Thomas. There’d be a massive ad campaign, rallies, fundraising, debates, the works. Obviously, The Dems never really crafted a coherent strategy, the holiday break wasn’t utilized, there were other issues on the front burner, and Alito is on his way.<\/p>\n

Was this a disappointing result? Sure. Is it a disaster for the left? Well, as Digby explained<\/a> very well, Dems may not have been able to defeat Alito, but this may turn out to be an eye-opening moment for the party and its activists.<\/p>\n

I know it hurts to lose this one. I won’t say that I’m not disappointed. But it was a very long shot from the outset and we managed to make some noise and get ourselves heard. The idea that it is somehow a sign of weakness because we only got 25 members of the Senate, including the entire leadership, to vote to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee<\/i> is funny to me. Two years ago I would have thought somebody was on crack if they even suggested it was possible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this sense, as frustrating as the Alito fight has been, what’s possible may be slowly changing. Something to keep in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I regret not having done more thorough coverage of the Senate “fight,” if we can call it that, over Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination yesterday, but my heart just wasn’t in it. The writing’s been on the wall for, well, several months now, so yesterday’s theatrics just weren’t as captivating as they could have been. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}