Hardly a week has passed since the November election without the publication of an analysis piece about the possibility of Senate Republicans invoking the “nuclear option.‿ The “nuclear option‿ refers to a showdown over the use of filibuster to stall a handful of George Bush’s nominees to the federal courts.

The filibuster is a practice peculiar and appropriate to the U.S. Senate in which one or more senators drone on and on and refuse to yield the floor until the majority of the Senate agrees to table the issue at hand and move on to other business. A filibuster can be stopped if 60 or more senators vote for it to end – and that is the fuse on the nuclear option. Republicans have 55 votes in the Senate; Democrats have 44 and Vermont’s Jim Jeffords is independent. Senate Republicans can approve any judicial candidate Mr. Bush chooses to send up, unless Democrats filibuster.

To get around the 60-vote rule, the Senate can change the rules of debate. A rule change requires only a simple majority (51 votes). Republicans say Democratic filibustering of judicial nominees is so unfair that they will change the filibuster rule (at least as it pertains to nominations). Democrats respond that if Republicans change the filibuster rule, they will bring the Senate to a standstill. For example, any senator can require that the full text of a piece of legislation be read into the record. Imagine how that would sound when a 1,300-page tax bill is up for consideration. Any single senator can put a “hold‿ on a legislative bill, which means no action can be taken on the bill until the senator removes the hold. Other, equally merry tricks are buried in the Senate rulebook.

If Republican and Democratic senators all make good on their threats, the government will sooner or later shut down, because spending authorizations have not been passed. That’s when nuclear winter sets in. Citizens get p.o.’ed when the federal government shuts down and they start looking for someone to blame. A decade ago, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich locked horns and Mr. Gingrich shut the government down. Public opinion went to Mr. Clinton and not long after, Mr. Gingrich was out on his keester.

Bearing that in mind, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is taking great care in plotting when and how to push the filibuster rule change and nudge the Senate toward critical mass. Now or later? Change the rule for one “sympathetic‿ nominee, or wait until several are backed up in the pipeline? He may even wait to see if Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ill with cancer, retires at the end of this Supreme Court term. The goal is to make the nation mad at the Democrats, but as is always the case with nuclear material, one slip and Mr. Frist, who wants to run for president in 2008, could himself be vaporized.

To the Senate Democrats, I say: don’t wait for Bill Frist. Seize the opportunity George Bush has laid before you this week and filibuster the nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations.

A wild-talking loose cannon who learned his international politics at Jesse Helms’s knee, Mr. Bolton is absolutely unfit to represent the United States before the world body and will be a source of unceasing embarrassment if he is sent.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal eight years ago, Mr. Bolton advocated for the U.S.’s defaulting on its UN dues, then grossly in arrears, basing his argument on the unilateral notion that international treaties need only be heeded as “political‿ considerations dictate. In 2000, he proposed reducing permanent membership on the UN Security Council to the U.S. only. In 2003, he exacerbated an already-tense atmosphere over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program by calling Kim Jong Il a “tyrannical dictator,‿ which may be true and may earn cheers from talk-radio listeners, but it ain’t diplomacy and it hurts, rather than helps, U.S. interests.

Even though they are outnumbered, Senate Democrats have been far too accommodating to the Bush administration’s asinine foreign policy. If Republicans want a showdown over the filibuster rule, there is no better reason to bring it on than stopping the tragic career of John Bolton. It’s not just good strategy; it’s the right thing to do.

© Mark Floegel, 2005