In an article at Foxnews.com on possible Supreme Court nominations, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to the first President Bush said the following about the filibuster rules in the Senate …

As it stands today [Democrats] can block [a nominee] … But I also believe that the president and majority leader may well decide to change the rules given the elections … The president has a very strong political support, potential support, for asking for and getting this change.

What does this mean exactly?

Certainly, a reelected president with an expanded senate majority has a lot more <$NoAd$> leverage to get his judicial nominees confirmed. There’s no getting around that. And it will be very difficult for Democrats to hold their whole caucus together to stymie a judicial appointment with a filibuster. Moreover, the 60 vote rule, on the merits, is subject to a lot of very valid criticism.

But what is it about the president’s victory on Tuesday that provides a moral authority or logic to changing the rules under which nominations are now approved?

This is a critical difference.

Democrats have to deal with the fact that President Bush is now no longer a minority president, however slim his majority may have been. They also need to contend with his expanded senate majorities.

But this is what I fear will be a growing pattern in this second term: an effort to use a narrowly secured majority not only to govern, even govern aggressively, but to make institutional changes that strip away the existing powers and rights of large minorities. These formal and informal checks and balances constitute the governmental soft-tissue that allows our political system to function.

An earlier example of this was the DeLay double-dip redistricting from last year. I believe we’ll see much more. And it’s a pattern that everyone should be watching closely.

This is reprinted from a post from last February …

It all reminds me of a line from a famous, or rather infamous, memo Pat Buchanan, then a White House staffer, wrote for Richard Nixon in, I believe, 1972 when their idea of the moment was what they called ‘positive polarization’.

At the end of this confidential strategy memo laying out various ideas about how to create social unrest over racial issues and confrontations with the judiciary, Buchanan wrote (and you can find this passage on p. 185 of Jonathan Schell’s wonderful Time of Illusion): “In conclusion, this is a potential throw of the dice that could bring the media on our heads, and cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”

And there you have it. Tear the country apart. And once it’s broken, our chunk will be bigger.

Apropos of the <$NoAd$>moment.

The dollar …

The dollar continued its decline in global currency <$NoAd$> markets yesterday, intensifying worries among some economists that mounting U.S. budget and trade deficits could send the U.S. currency into a tailspin.

But John B. Taylor, the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, defended the Bush administration view that the deficits pose no danger of a dollar collapse. He issued a detailed rebuttal of what he called “scare stories.”

The dollar fell yesterday to within a fraction of a cent of its all-time low against the euro of $1.2930 , trading as low as $1.2898 before rallying slightly to close at $1.2867. It fell modestly against the Japanese yen, and continued a sharp slide against the Canadian dollar, which rose to 83 U.S. cents yesterday for the first time in 12 years.

It was the second straight day that the dollar has fallen despite a surge in the stock market, continuing a trend that began in early October when it started slipping against the currencies of major U.S. trading partners. The decline rekindled the fears of some analysts that the dollar could be headed for a severe sell-off unless the White House and Congress make a major effort to shrink the budget gap.

The rest from the Post …

Surveying the scene today, one thing that occurs to me is that President Bush is remaking the government into something that is looking more and more like a parliamentary democracy. I don’t mean in every specific, of course; the key feature of the Bush presidency is an extremely powerful executive that to a great degree coopts and controls his own congressional majorities.

But the similarities are important and worth understanding. The key elements are extremely tight party discipline (something political scientists have lamented the absence of for years) and a sharp diminishment of rivalries between the branches of government which used to cut against unified party control.

Party discipline is simple enough. President Bush’s first term was replete with examples. And an instructive comparison is how much President Bush was able to accomplish with thin majorities in 2001-02 compared to what President Clinton was able to do with much more substantial majorities in 1993-94.

Today I’m struck by this most recent example with Arlen Specter.

Fresh from his successful senate reelection campaign, Specter (heir apparent to the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee) suggested he’d hold the line against anti-Roe v. Wade judges President Bush might appoint.

Then no more than a day later he beat a hasty and shamefaced retreat.

“Contrary to press accounts, I did not warn the President about anything and was very respectful of his Constitutional authority on the appointment of federal judges.

“As the record shows, I have supported every one of President Bush’s nominees in the Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor. I have never and would never apply any litmus test on the abortion issue and, as the record shows, I have voted to confirm Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O’Connor, and Justice Kennedy and led the fight to confirm Justice Thomas.

“I have already sponsored a protocol calling for a Judiciary Committee hearing within thirty days of a nomination, a vote out of Committee thirty days later, and floor action thirty days after that. I am committed to such prompt action by the Committee on all of President Bush’s nominees.

“In light of the repeated filibusters by the Democrats in the last Senate session, I am concerned about a potential repetition of such filibusters. I expect to work well with President Bush in the judicial confirmation process in the years ahead.”

I assume the word came down from the White House to Sen. Specter that he simply wouldn’t be Chairman if that were his attitude.

Then we have the incident we noted yesterday in which Sen. Frist may, at the president’s say-so, change the cloture rules which require 60 votes to push through legislation.

Past presidents have usually had to deal with Majority Leaders who were much more solicitous of their chamber’s independence and institutional prerogatives. But then again, President Bush all but appointed Frist to his post. So this should not surprise us.

There’s even an element of parliamentarism in President Bush’s post-election comments about his mandate and his right to expect others to fall in line behind views because he won a majority, even if a small one, at the ballot box.

It’s fine to bemoan this. And there’s much to bemoan. But Democrats also need to learn how to live with it, at least for the next four years. And that means realizing that for at least the next two years, the President can get passed almost anything he wants to. His congressional majorities are now sufficiently padded that he can even afford a few Republican defections. He simply doesn’t need Democrats for anything.

And that means approaching most legislative battles not with an eye toward preventing passage or significantly altering legislation, but placing alternatives on the table that the party will be able use as contrasts to frame the next two elections. In other words, their only remaining viable alternative is to be an actual party of opposition.

Bill Clinton as Chairman of the DNC? So says this LA Times editorial. To me it sounds like a great idea. And I say that as someone who believes Hillary Clinton never should and probably (hopefully) never will run for president.

Good post-election demographic and political analysis from Judis, Teixeira and Katz.

One small silver lining to last week’s election result is that it will take away at least some of the election year paralysis over Iraq.

I think there was actually far less disagreement over the course of events in Iraq than election rhetoric would lead one to believe. Democrats grasped on to everything that was going wrong (and it wasn’t hard to find things). And most Republicans did the opposite, since to criticize the conduct of the war, they felt, was to criticize the president on his way to a tight reelection contest.

I don’t necessarily expect the administration’s tune to change in any way. But I’ll be watching congressional Republicans to see if and when they start changing their tunes and begin looking for ways to clean up the mess that’s been created over there.

We’ll probably also start to get a fuller and clearer accounting of various messes in the country that the White House managed to keep hushed up until after the election. Like this story in yesterday’s Times about at least 4,000 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles from Iraq’s pre-war arsenal that have apparently also gone missing.

Grant President Bush his due. He’s the first president since his father to win the office with a majority of the popular vote. President Clinton, who ran twice in three-way races, came very close (49.2%) in 1996, but never did.

Yet I’m interested in collecting a list of the most ludicrous overstatements of the scope of the president’s victory.

The president himself made a good start of it by calling his win a “broad nationwide victory.”

So far the best I’ve come up with is from is from investment advice columnist Donald Luskin who says that President Bush won reelection in a “landslide.”

Have any other good ones? Drop me a line and let me know.

Also worth noting is this article in today’s Post on Rove’s strategy and victory. There’s a lot in here that is simply the winning team’s version of events — clever gambits that would have seemed foolish had the result turned out differently. But they didn’t turn out differently. And it’s worth understanding why and how they believe they did it.

A couple days ago, I wrote that I believe “Hillary Clinton never should and probably (hopefully) never will run for president.” And a number of you have asked, why?

I have two basic reasons, one principled, another pragmatic.

Before we get to those, however, I should note that I wrote close to the same thing almost four years ago in an article in Slate about why the Hillary for President idea was fanciful verging on ridiculous. And, on top of that, I’m a fan of hers. I don’t buy into any of the Hillary-bashing myths.

(At first, I believed that only journalists and Republicans were fueling the Hillary for Prez line. But eventually I learned that there were actually some Clinton insiders who believed and wanted it to happen.)

But back to the two reasons.

First, I don’t like the idea of the presidency becoming the private preserve of a few chosen families. It’s bad for democracy, even if a given individual might have much to recommend him or her as a candidate.

Since many are now talking up the possibility of Jeb Bush running for president in 2008, that opens up at least the theoretical possibility that one family could hold the White House for most of a 28 year period (1989-2017). Whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, Bush-lover or Bush-hater, that can’t be good for republican government in the United States.

(Much is made of the father-and-son presidencies of John (1797-1801) and John Quincy Adams (1825-29). Much less is made of the fact that they were, in effect, members of different political parties.)

As big a fan as I am of Bill Clinton, I’d be against another Clinton family presidency even if there weren’t a Bush family. But given that we’re now two President Bushes and counting, it makes it all the more important for Democrats to be clear on the principle at issue. A (Hillary) Clinton v. (Jeb) Bush grudge match in 2008 would be a sign of all sorts of sclerotic tendencies in American politics.

Now, to the second reason, the one I focused most on in that Jan. 2000 article in Slate. And that would be, ‘Are you kidding?’

Let’s be honest, Hillary Clinton is a deeply divisive figure. And if there’s one thing Democrats have learned in this and the previous election it is the danger of going into a national election with a candidate who cannot even get a real hearing over a large swath of the country.

As I wrote in that Slate article …

Gore won virtually all the Northeast, all the West Coast, and nearly all the Industrial Midwest, but failed to win any other state except New Mexico. What did him in in the rest of the country was cultural liberalism—support for gun control, abortion rights, and gay rights. This handicap was particularly evident in Appalachia—West Virginia, Tennessee, western Pennsylvania, and southeastern Ohio. And who is more identified with cultural liberalism, Al Gore or Hillary Clinton?

Nothing about 2004 changes that calculus at all, I think. But I would add only this slight gloss on that point.

My point here is not that Democrats need to ditch support for any of those three positions. Nor do I think that the lesson of 2004 is that Democrats need to ‘move to the right’ or restrict the next nomination cycle to guys born beneath the Mason-Dixon line.

But the electoral fault line running through the country is now quite clear. And, for Democrats, if winning the presidency is to be anything other than the political equivalent drawing an inside straight, the party needs to put a good half dozen more states into play next time around.

(I should say that this would apply even if Kerry had won Ohio and the election.)

The point is that on Hillary Clinton, the cement is already dry. On the cultural fault-line that has played such a clear role in the last two elections, perceptions of her are already set.

Nominating Hillary would simply mean that Democrats would be going into the election with one hand tied — no chained — behind their back. And as we’ve seen, they need at least two hands.