Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) takes to the pages of the Yuma Sun to fret about Senate rules reform:
James Madison explained his vision of the Senate as the “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that often influences the way the U.S. House of Representatives operates.
George Washington likened the House to hot tea, and the Senate was the “saucer” that cooled it.
On the first day of the new Congress, many Senate Democrats wanted that saucer shattered.
Boo hoo! This is terrible! How terrible? This terrible:
Later in 2005, with Senate Republicans still in the majority, then-Senator Barack Obama declared, “What [the American People] do not expect is for one party, be it Republican or Democrat, to change the rules in the middle of the game so they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet.” He too was right.
Zowie! A guy who's no longer a Senator once said that no one should change the rules in the middle of the game!
Of course, this isn't the middle of the game, and that's the point. It's the very beginning of the game, which is when everyone, from children on the playground on up (to, say, children in the Senate), normally agree that the rules get set.
Gosh, the only thing that could make Kyl's plaintive whine more ridiculous would be if Kyl himself had argued in 2005 that the rules could be changed in the middle of the game! I mean, that would be insane, right?!
Welcome to Crazy Town (PDF):
One way that Senators can restore the Senate’s traditional understanding of its advice and consent responsibility is to employ the “constitutional option” — an exercise of a Senate majority’s power under the Constitution to define Senate practices and procedures.
This constitutional option is well grounded in the U.S. Constitution and in Senate history. The Senate has always had, and repeatedly has exercised, the constitutional power to change the Senate’s procedures through a majority vote.
Holy cow! You'd have to be a total moron to believe that Senator Kyl could say one thing in 2005, then say the opposite in 2011, and still be allowed to say it's the other side that's being hypocritical!
No one would ever report that! Why, if you did, no one would ever believe your media outlet ever again!
The fact is that what precedent there is for the constitutional option exists at the beginning of a new Congress -- that is, at the beginning of the game, not the middle. So not only is Kyl engaged in some truly astounding hypocrisy right now, he was also taking the lead in distorting that reality in 2005, when he took precedent that had been tied for decades to the start of a new Congress, and insisted it was entirely the same as using it in the proverbial "middle of the game."
Whether the Senate succeeds or not in implementing rules reform this year, naysayers all along have insisted that even suggesting that a majority may opt to close debate and change the rules will somehow "come back to haunt" Senate Democrats if the majority changes hands, and that the new majority would then be perfectly entitled to change the rules using the very same process.
Well, they would. But to claim that such a change in the future would be directly attributable and only attributable to changes attempted today would be to willfully ignore the Senate's prior history, and most especially the fight of 2005. A future Republican rules change will doubtless be termed some sort of righteous revenge for 2011, when the reality is that almost the entire procedural framework for the proposed changes mirrors practice cited in no less than glowing terms by the Republican majority of 2005.
That's not to mention that the reforms proposed are mild at best, and in some cases offer dramatic concessions to the minority.
Senate Democrats can still back away from being the ones to turn the tables. But to do so in the belief that it'll buy them some kindness and consideration under any future Republican majorities is just crazy. More likely, it'll just give Republicans the chance to finish what they started in 2005, but plant the story among those without institutional memory that this particular world was created in 2011.
Even though the ancient scrolls revealing that the truth is the exact opposite still exist. In the dusty and forgotten caves of... the Internet.