Here come Little Boy and Fat Man…

Salon's Tim Grieve provides you with "Everything you wanted to know about the 'nuclear option'" - a solid in-depth look at the Republican's plan to eliminate the filibuster in an effort to get a handful of judicial nominees voted on.

When you look at the numbers with regard to Bush’s nominees, and compare them with the numbers for previous Presidents’ judicial nominees (as this article does), the Republicans really don’t have much to complain about.

Grieve raises some good points about the fact that the majority party will always hate the filibuster, just as the minority party will always love it. But to my mind, it serves a useful purpose and it provides another check/balance in an attempt to keep things fair. What really scares me about this current administration and their Republican cohorts is the ongoing desire to bully their position through no matter what, without having any actual discourse or lending an ear to anyone else’s thoughts, opinions or concerns. The attempt to kill the filibuster is just the latest example.

According to Grieve, there is a proposal out there whereby the Dem’s might be willing to allow a vote on four of the seven stalled nominees and would further agree to rarely filibuster future nominees. But Frist apparently wants nothing to do with such a bargain, as he is demanding a vote on every single nominee. Such stalwart unwillingness to compromise scares me in a country where there are many (mostly-equal) valid opinions on various issues, even in the case where it’s “one of my guys” who’s being unrelenting.

I don’t know what the long term solution is here, to either this “nuclear option” problem or to the larger problem of getting more parity between the Republicans and Democrats. And unfortunately, nobody in D.C. seems to have an idea either, or to much care.

So I guess it’s bombs away.