With due respect to Shannen and Ramesh, I don’t believe there is convincing evidence for one of the key propositions they seem to agree about: viz., that the Democrats have already paid a political price for their prior filibustering.

This claim is most often made in connection with the defeat of Sen. Daschle. But the suggestion that his very narrow defeat in a state that is not a bell-weather was somehow akin to a national disapproval of the filibusters is wishful thinking at best. Daschle was beaten because of an overall sense that he was a phony on many issues — a senator who pretended to be a moderate bridge-builder when speaking with the home folks but who was shown to be a vigorous partisan obstructionist in Washington. The filibusters were part of that, but they weren’t close to being all of it. Had Daschle won, which he came very close to doing, could it really credibly have been said that this signalled that the filibusters were a a winning Democratic strategy? We would have scoffed at such a contention, and I don’t think the counterclaim is any more persuasive just because he lost.

My general impression before and after the election, fwiw, was that the administration had done a poor job making the judicial nominations a consequential political issue. I agree that the filibusters are a matter that could and should resonate with the American people, but I don’t see evidence that the issue has been exploited. I don’t know what Democrats other than Daschle we are talking about when we say they have “paid a price.” Had the national election actually raised the profile of the filibusters issue in any meaningful way, Sen. Specter’s assumption of the Judiciary Committee chair would have been much more controversial than it actually was. (That’s not a comment on Sen. Specter’s stand on filibusters; just an observation that more people would have cared about who was put in charge of the Judiciary Cmte.) The argument after the election was about whether voters had primarily been swayed by national security concerns or social issues like gay marriage. The judiciary, which should be an issue of similarly weighty dimension, simply was not one.

This is why the Democrats feel safe continuing to block nominees. Look at the contrast: They did not filibuster AG Ashcroft or AG Gonzales, even though they objected to both, because national security has been successfully made into a consequential national issue, and thus they did not believe they could afford politically to be responsible for leaving those posts vacant. There is no such urgency about the judiciary. Filibustering is a safe strategy.

The upsides to the Democrats of filibustering are abundantly clear: (a) their core constituency groups, including Hollywood, the trial lawyers and the pro-abortion lobby, fork up lots of money; (b) since they have not been successful convincing voters to support their policies in the normal democratic process, the power to hold sway over the composition of the federal courts means they get important parts of their agenda imposed by judicial fiat; and (c) if they can hold out long enough, the inevitable backlog (due to what is a months-long vetting process for each of hundreds of nominees) will inevitably result in more open seats to be filled by a Democrat if one wins the White House back in 2008.

To the contrary, the downsides are not clear at all — neither that the Dems have suffered in the past, nor that they will suffer meaningfully going forward. They know the mainstream media will be with them, and there is every chance — with 2006 elections looming and with several “moderate” Republican senators already wobbly on the wisdom of dispensing with the filibuster rule — that the Dems will conclude, perhaps rightly, that the GOP will not have the unity needed to exploit the filibusters for political gain.

I wish I could be more optimistic, but the only realistic way this becomes a high-profile political issue is if the senate Republicans pull the trigger on the “nuclear”/”constitutional” option.