Talk Talk Talk

I haven’t been watching much of the current Republican-engineered senatorial gabfest, but I’ve seen excerpts here and there, hilights of white men in suits standing in front of placards bearing misleading numbers in large fonts, arguing over whether the Democrats’ blockage of four judicial nominees constitutes an assault on the constitution, and whether the similar Republican blockages of 68 Clinton judicial nominees was the same thing. Blah blah blah.

So far, it appears to be a depressing litany of formalized partisan bickering, with one exception. Before it all started, the ancient Robert Byrd stood up and asked Senate majority leader Bill Frist if they could delay the proceedings for a couple of hours to get some work done on a long-overdue appropriation bill. Frist refused, of course, and eventually Byrd sat down. But it was nice seeing the old man try. He strikes me, these days, as the embodiment of … not so much the way things used to be, but the way they ought to be, in our nation’s Congress: he seems principled, forthright, well-spoken, and passionately opposed to all the crazy, up-is-down, farcical illogic that passes for policy in these trying times.

Byrd has a grievously checkered past, however, so it’s difficult to hold him up as paragon of senatorial virtue; but standing there stooped and palsied, tilting at the windmills of majority supremacy, he struck me as a valiant and doomed figure, the perfect representative of a valiant and doomed system of governance. The system that the founders set up for us is designed to move slowly, to inch unperturbed across the landscape of history while events whirl around it, a stately turtle armored against the vicissitudes of the current political climate, the partisan whim of the moment. But I can’t imagine that they intended things to be this vituperative, this ugly and petty. The word “politics” has achieved the status of epithet in our society, and watching this farce play out, it’s easy to see why.