Titus Andemocrat

A couple of comments regarding the filibuster have been made by local Democratics. Our own blogarillo, in a comments thread yesterday on PTS, said:

What goes around comes around. If the filibuster is done away with you can bet Democrats will use it to their advantage when they retake the senate in '06.

Local Democratic activist Mark Lazar asked Republicans to consider a similar scenario in a letter to the editor published this morning in the Amarillo Globe-Republican:

Frist's proposed power grab would make the Senate a mere rubber stamp for the president's decisions. Consider what will happen when the other party controls the Senate and the White House.

Revenge fantasies are always fun. The idea of revenge has led a vibrant literary tradition, extending from Shakespeare's first play Titus Andronicus to Rambo and beyond. And we certainly have many of the elements of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy at work here:

• an offense maximized by insult
• a scheming villain, often evil, but still vulnerable
  
• clarification of strategy and marshaling of resources
• a series of delays, obstacles, diversions, etc.,
  
• an unforeseen development that almost, but not quite, thwarts the scheme
  
• showdown

Motifs used in the revenge tragedy also apply to the battle over the filibuster:

• sensational use of horrors
• philosophic soliloquies
• suicide
  
• insanity

So that's our script. Much has been made of the fact that many prominent Democrats opposed the filibuster in the mid-90s. Well, of course they did. Obviously a Senator's attitude about the filibuster depends on who is in charge, just like my attitude toward the Boardwalk and Park Place properties on a Monopoly gameboard depends on whether I own them or someone else does. That's why it's so scary that these Republicans are seriously trying to end the filibuster.

They don't expect us to be able to exact revenge. Republicans would never change the rules if they expected Democrats to ever regain power.

SPACEDARK