Shannen, respectfully, I think you are proving my point about wishful thinking. First, I don’t know how you can say I have blinked reality by purportedly missing the electoral importance of Daschle’s obstructionism. I explicitly said that Daschle was beaten because he “was shown to be a vigorous partisan obstructionist.” Where we part company on this is that you seem to see the filibusters as burned into the public mind as the symbol of that obstructionism, and I think that is a vast overstatement. As I said, the filibusters were part of a much broader case that Daschle was an obstructionist. I think it is a mistake to deduce from Daschle’s defeat a conclusion that Americans are angry over the filibusters such that the Democrats realize they should avoid them. If that were true, it would mean that had Daschle won by a few votes rather than lost, you would be in a position of conceding that Americans approved of the filibusters. I don’t think you’d make such a concession, and you’d be quite right to resist it.

Moreover, outside of Daschle, what is it that causes you to say the Democrats have paid a price for filibustering? Or that they have much reason to worry about paying a price? I’m afraid I don’t see anything but a big net gain for them. My sense is that these calculations about the political consequences misses the main point. The Democrats don’t need to be a national party or a legislative majority. We keep acting like this is vital to them — it’s not. If they control the judiciary, and the judiciary imposes its will on the electorate, the Dems get to force their agenda on the country without needing to win seats in Congress. What would you rather have today: 60 seats in the senate or 6 seats on the Supreme Court? I’m betting the Dems would be satisfied for the foreseeable future to have only 44 senate seats if they could have 6 (or even 5 dependable) votes on the Supreme Court and parity or better on the appellate courts.

Finally, I think you and Kathryn are over-estimating the degree of controversy attendant to Sen. Specter’s assumption of the Judiciary Committee chair. Concededly, the Judiciary Committee is and was a very big deal at NRO, among conservatives, and among lawyers (like you and me) who care passionately about the composition of the courts because we see more up close the day-to-day consequences of judicial legislating. But if we extend out of that regrettably small fishbowl, it just wasn’t that big a deal out in the country. Had it been, the GOP had several viable options for blocking Sen. Specter. They did not avail themselves of those options because, while there was some controversy, there was no political groundswell for doing so.