The situational ethics of Sen. Jon Kyl
Think back to the spring of 2005, just three and a half years ago, before this presidential campaign started. The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. The Democrats in the Senate were more or less powerless to stop the GOP from running the country into the ground, and seldom exercised their right to filibuster legislation or judicial nominees.
Then, Bush nominated some particularly offensive candidates to the federal bench, and the Democrats in the Senate threatened to filibuster a few of them. The Republicans went apoplectic. They threatened to revoke the filibuster for judicial nominees, screeching endlessly about how judicial nominees deserved an "up or down vote." James Dobson and his gang of thugs held events at churches called "Justice Sunday," which were thinly disguised political campaign events intended to intimidate Democrats into caving to the Bush agenda. Bill Frist and his cronies made appearances at several of them. The GOP threatened to invoke the "nuclear option," which would have completely eliminated filibusters for judicial nominees.
Remember that?
Here are the words of Arizona's Republican Senator Jon Kyl, speaking at the time in support of the "nuclear option:"
There may well come a Supreme Court vacancy soon. I just don't think the people of the country are going to stand by and let a minority dictate whether or not we're even going take a vote on a nominee.
And here:
Our Democratic colleagues have to make a decision. Will they continue their filibuster or not? If they do, and they're not willing to discuss any kind of a compromise, then I don't see any alternative but to reestablish the tradition of the majority vote.
By "majority vote," he means 51 senators instead of the 60 needed to stop a filibuster.
But that was then. Now that Barack Obama is due to be inaugurated in a couple of months, Kyl seems to have shifted his views on "the tradition of the majority vote:"
Jon Kyl, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, warned president-elect Barack Obama that he would filibuster U.S. Supreme Court appointments if those nominees were too liberal.
Got that? Kyl was against judicial filibusters before he was for them.