They may not be supposed to, and they may not live up to it, but they certainly seem to imply they are.
They (conservatives) absolutely imply that others are not, and that is something that is wrong with them (not-conservatives).
Would de-escalation do any good?
How would you suggest one side or the other de-escalate, without that side essentially losing and marginalizing themselves for a generation or so?
People here are at most voters. We are having a debate, some might even say a great debate, over what best positions to take in regards to voting and conferring with our congress critters, and talking to our peers, n convincing them to do the same.
As long as things are not heated and pit worthy here, there really is not much to de-escalate, unless by de-escalate, you mean admit defeat and give up.
(my bold in the above.) Not meaning to nitpick or anything, I am just curious, as both of those de-escalate’s are typo’d exactly the same way, does your spellchecker have “esalate” in it as a word?
Thankfully for Republicans, there’s no way ending the filibuster could possibly come back and bite them in the ass. This is an absolutely risk-free and negative-free action.
Haynsworth’s numbers are in stark contrast: 19 Democrats and 26 Republicans voted for; 38 Democrats and 17 Republicans voted against.
And while there were unjustified attacks on his record, the attacks against Haynsworth were not as vicious or as propagated to the public as those against Bork’s were. The complaint was that Haynsworth ruled too strictly against labor, not that “In Haynsworth’s America, labor leaders would be taken away in midnight raids.”
Against Bork, Kennedy said that in Robert Bork’s America, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.
I accept that at some future date, Republicans will be the minority party in the Senate and they would like to find themselves with the power to filibuster, but the Dems actions in 2013 showed them and me that that’s not a reasonable hope. I accept that the filibuster is on it’s way out, and I’d prefer that Gorsuch not be its final victim.
Similarly, the Republicans’ actions in 2016 and now have shown me that there’s no reasonable hope that the Republicans wouldn’t end the filibuster later (for example, to replace RBG). Thus, the Democrats lost nothing by using the filibuster and having it removed.
This strikes me as a fundamentally flawed way of thinking through the history.
X opposition votes in Y year has a completely different political meaning from X opposition votes decades later or earlier, because there has been a dramatic realignment in our politics. Our parties are much more ideologically polarized. Winning just a single vote from across the aisle in the Senate these days is a huge bipartisan victory. Thirty years ago, it would be proof that the bill was hopelessly partisan.
Both sides make this mistake. The fact that a handful of Republicans opposed Bork doesn’t prove it was bipartisan in the sense of crossing ideological lines. Those Senators would all be Democrats now! And the further back you go, the more ridiculous this exercise becomes.
Your post seems to suggest you think this is so self-evidently wrong that it doesn’t even merit explanation of why it’s wrong. I don’t think that’s the case.
It doesn’t matter now, but I wasn’t as confident as you were that Senators Graham, McCain, Collins, Corker, and Murkowski would have supported removing the filibuster to, for example, replace RBG with William Pryor. They might have, but it was a question in my mind that (thankfully) will not have to be answered now.
I talk about 2013 because that was when the “nuclear option” was first used. Surely you can see how it’s relevant to today’s events? Yes, there were circumstances then that led the Dems to conclude they had no reasonable course of action but go nuclear, just like today there were circumstances that led the Republicans to conclude they had no reasonable course of action but go nuclear.
Probably depends on the meaning of “rogue police”. I’d characterize Bull Connor (and his deputies) as “rogue police”, even if what they did was strictly legal at the time, for example.