Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is watching in rapt attention the goings-on in the Senate today. Since that august body has taken up debate on Bush judges.

Your Maximum Leader has not weighed in on this subject in this forum, but has privately to some. This fight, fascinating as it is, leaves your Maximum Leader torn in a number of different ways.

On the one hand, your Maximum Leader is disgusted by Democrats in the Senate. They can’t stop the Republicans through winning elections, so they are now resorting to parliamentary tactics. Now don’t get your Maximum Leader wrong on this, he LOVES parliamentary tactics. Indeed, should he need to occupy the post of Vice-President of the US in the establishment of the MWO he will make it his life’s work to stop that body from considering new laws through every parliamentary trick imaginable. And as frequent readers of this space know, your Maximum Leader is fond of gridlock in government - because it means that the government is governing less and that is generally good.

But on the other hand we are a nation of laws. And, since petitioning the emperor has had no place in our legal system, we need judges to see to it that the business of litigation and prosecution is done throughout the land. Generally speaking, your Maximum Leader thinks it IS a good idea for the Senate to move in a speedy fashion to confirm judicial appointments. (Cabinet appointments are another matter all together.)

So, in the fight over Bush appointees, your Maximum Leader is torn. Your Maximum Leader is all in favour of the filibuster in the Senate. (Which is the most undemocratic tradition in our republic - BTW.) The general idea of a body with rules that support unlimited debate is a sound one. But on the other hand, tradition also (generally) supports the timely confirmation by the Senate of judicial appointments.

While he thinks that the Republicans will win this fight and end judicial nomine filibusters; he thinks that it would be better in the long run to not fight this battle. But now that the battle is joined, you have to win the fight. The best outcome would have been for Democrats to just confirm the judges and do their best to take control of the Senate and White House so that they could, in turn, confirm their own people. (NB: There is a difference between killing a nomination in Committee and filibustering it on the floor of the Senate after the nomination has been discharged. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t - and to his knowledge no one in Washington ever has - objected to nominations dying in Committee.)

How this will affect the judiciary is a subject for another post all together.

Carry on.