Remember the nuclear option

I know I was in the minority on this point among liberals and progressives, but back when the Senate was preparing to vote on several Bush court nominees I wrote a column calling for the end of the Senate filibuster.

My argument was a simple one: The filibuster thwarts, rather than defends, democracy, giving the minority too much power over the Senate.

The filibuster is, as the self-professed “liberal Democrat” Timothy Noah wrote … on the online magazine Slate, a conservative instrument designed to thwart the will of the majority. The Los Angeles Times, in an editorial, echoes this: “The filibuster is a reactionary instrument that goes too far in empowering a minority of senators,” the paper wrote.

At the time, Democrats were threatening to use the method to prevent some noxious Bush nominees from rising to the federal bench. Liberals were calling loudly for all Democrats to stand firm, their 45-vote bloc allowing them to prevent the majority from closing out debate, which would mean that no vote could be taken and the judicial nominees would remain in limbo. (Disclosure: I had the same argument in an earlier column, before thinking the issue through.)

Republicans were livid and were calling for the “nuclear option” (a poor choice of words in a time of war), in which the party would just change the rules and eliminate the maneuver. Thanks to a group of so-called moderates, it never happened. A compromise was reached and some of the nominees were confirmed.

The compromise ended two debates — one on the judges and the other on the legitimacy of the filibuster.

The filibuster is back in the news these days, as the Republicans, now in the minority, are resorting to the very tactic they decried just two years ago in an effort to prevent debate over a nonbinding resolution opposing the Bush surge plan for Iraq.

Democrats should take note and remember their history. They may have successfully used the filibuster to keep some nominees from getting through, but conservatives also have been successful in the past — Southern Democrats used it from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s to derail civil rights legislation.

Basically, if there were no filibuster, the Senate would be debating war and not whether to debate.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Front-page news


I find myself hooked on a Web page offered by the Newseum — “the interactive museum of news” — that offers a look at hundreds of front pages from around the world.

The feature, called “Today’s Front Pages,” is a great resource for someone like me who is a page design junkie. As a newspaper editor responsible for designing and laying out front pages for the Post and Press, the chance to see what hundreds of other editors are doing is priceless.

I have my own sense of what works up front — large lead photo, for instance, a mix of headline fonts, a vertical layout and lots of “entry points” (teases and logos, small inset photos, etc.). Seeing others, however, can be instructive.

The Fresno Bee (left), for instance, offers a vertical page and a gripping photo of a distraught woman that accompanies a story about a fire. It also offers a small headshot at the bottom left that draws the reader to an otherwise nondescript government story. A very attractive page.

The Decatur Daily of Tennessee (top) scores (pun intended) with a winning layout that features a lot of horizontal art that is set off with a long vertical column down the right. What I like best, however, is the soccer photo that accompanies the lead story, which helps offset the lead truck shot.

The Herald Times (above right), though, has what I think is a key element — a photo of a face that covers a huge amount of front-page real estate. It also uses a long column on the right to elongate the page and a headshot to anchor the bottom story on the page.

The Newseum site is, for me, the equivalent of a comic-book message board or an Apple tech site — a place to do research, to get a sense of trends and a way to measure what I do against the industry.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.