February 19 – 21, 2005 Weekend Edition.

Long Live Mr. Smith - And the Filibuster!

By BILL PRESS

On almost everybody’s list of all-time great American movies is Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

You know the story. A naive Scoutmaster named Jefferson Smith, played brilliantly by Jimmy Stewart, is appointed to a vacancy in the U.S. Senate — only because the governor and senior Senator assume he’ll be a patsy. But when they try to enlist him in corrupt, special-interest legislation, Smith refuses. He takes to the Senate floor, exposes the whole deal, and doesn’t stop speaking until they drop their plans.

The 1939 classic is still so popular because Jimmy Stewart represents what we all long for: an honest politician who can’t be bought or sold, who will stand up and fight for the little guy. And how did he do it? By staging his own filibuster.

Well, sports fans, you can kiss Jimmy Stewart goodbye. If Senate President Bill Frist gets his way, the opportunity for a minority to have a fighting chance against the majority will soon be gone forever. Mr. Smith will be thrown out of Washington. Frist is determined to drop what he calls the “nuclear option” — and outlaw the filibuster.

The filibuster is used far less frequently today than during its heyday in the mid-20th century. In 1953, Oregon’s Wayne Morse spoke for 22 hours and 26 minutes against offshore oil legislation. He was topped by New York’s Alphonse D’Amato, in 1986, rambling on for 23 hours and 30 minutes over a military spending bill that cut funding for a bomber being built in Long Island. But both fell short of the record set in 1957 by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond: 24 hours and 18 minutes of diatribe against the Civil Rights Act. You have to admire his bladder, if nothing else.

Even though the filibuster is now rare, Sen. Frist is upset because, during President Bush’s first term, Senate Democrats used it to block 10 of his judicial nominees. This is unfair, complains Frist. The Senate is not supposed to block nominees, only “advise and consent.” Otherwise, he says, we suffer from a “tyranny of the minority.”

Frist is all wet. It’s true that Democrats blocked 10 Bush nominees from the bench. Ten people, by the way, who don’t belong on the federal bench. But — here’s the point — Democrats held up only 10 nominees, out of a total of 229. In other words, Bush got 97 percent of what he asked for. More than Clinton or Reagan. What’s Frist whining about? What’s Bush whining about?

Second, Frist doesn’t understand what democracy, or the Senate, are all about. It’s not a “tyranny of the minority” that threatens our democratic form of government. As political philosophers John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville both warned us, democracy’s greatest potential pitfall is a “tyranny of the majority” — where the minority no longer have any voice. Long live the filibuster.

Not only that, our Founding Fathers deliberately designed the Senate to be different from the House of Representatives. The House, where there is no filibuster, is more impetuous, less cautious, more prone to pass anything. I heard Sen. Lindsay Graham recently compare the House to a “prosecutor with a grand jury: You can indict a ham sandwich in 10 minutes.”

The Senate was created as the more deliberative body, more thoughtful, less inclined to rush into anything. Benjamin Franklin compared it the saucer into which you pour coffee to let it cool before drinking. Long live the filibuster.

Frist is a heart surgeon. You’d think he wouldn’t be dumb enough to kill a procedural tool that Republicans, too, will need someday, when they’re back in the minority. But apparently he is that dumb.

Before exercising his “nuclear option,” however, Frist should learn a lesson from Iraq. Georgia’s Freshman Sen. Johnny Isakson recently returned from Iraq, where he asked Kurdish leaders if they were worried about being outvoted in a Shiite-dominated National Assembly. Oh no, they told him. They’d borrowed a secret weapon from the United States: the filibuster.

“If there were ever a reason for optimism about giving more aid to Iraq,” Isakson said on the Senate floor, “it is one of their minority leaders proudly stating one of the pillars and principles of our government as the way they would ensure that the majority never overran the minority.”

If it’s good enough for Iraq, it’s good enough for the United States. Long live the filibuster.