If we only had a spine...

[endarkenment]

Suppose way back in 2005 when:


In the 2005 Senate, Republicans held 55 seats and the Democrats held 45 including Jim Jeffords, an independent from Vermont who caucused with the Democrats. Confirmation requires a plurality of votes, and the Republicans could easily confirm their nominees if brought to the floor. Earlier in 2005, Democrats had blocked the nomination of 10 of George W. Bush's nominees, saying they were too conservative and that Republicans had blocked many of their nominees back in the 1990s. Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) then threatened to use the nuclear option in response. Democrats warned that if Frist used the nuclear option they would shut down the Senate so that no business of any sort could be transacted.

...

Critical mass

On Friday, May 20, a cloture vote for the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown was rescheduled for Tuesday, May 24. The failure of this cloture vote would be the beginning of the nuclear option, immediately followed by the asking for the ruling of the Chair on the Constitutionality of the Filibuster. On May 23, 2005, Majority Leader Frist called for a vote on Priscilla Owen. This threatened to trigger the nuclear option.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) reached out to a number of colleagues on both sides to compromise by winning confirmation of some of the disputed nominees (Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor, and Priscilla Owen) while preserving the judicial filibuster on William Myers and Henry Saad.<44> Their efforts succeeded on the evening of May 23, 2005, one day before the cloture vote. They announced an agreement by seven Republican and seven Democratic Senators to avert a vote on the nuclear option while preserving the filibuster for "extraordinary circumstances."<45> The block of senators who agreed to the compromise included Republicans McCain, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Warner of Virginia, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island; and Democrats Nelson, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Ken Salazar of Colorado. This group was quickly dubbed "the Gang of 14" in various blogs and news outlets. McCain, Chafee, Collins and Snowe were already on record as opposing the nuclear option, leaving the Democrats two votes short of defeating an attempt to trigger it (they would have needed 51 votes to override Vice President Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote).

The bipartisan group was large enough to deny Frist the 50 votes he needed to trigger the nuclear option, and also large enough to reach cloture on a Democratic filibuster. It states, in part:

..we commit to oppose the rules changes in the 109th Congress, which we understand to be any amendment to or interpretation of the Rules of the Senate that would force a vote on a judicial nomination by means other than unanimous consent or Rule XXII.

Democrats in the Gang agreed not to filibuster the judges listed in the agreement (save in "extraordinary" circumstances) and Republicans in the Gang agreed not to vote for the nuclear option (save in "extraordinary" circumstances). The definition of what constituted an "extraordinary" circumstance was left up to the individual senator. For example, Graham and DeWine let it be known that they did not consider nominations to the Supreme Court to fit the definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option

suppose instead that our party of no principals worth fighting for had stood firm and not caved and had forced Frist et al to bring it on?

Where would we be right now? We would be able to pass the house version of the stimulus bill unchanged.

Does our leadership get it? Do they understand that their unwillingness to stand and fight for anything is a recipe for endless defeat?