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Legal Commentary

: Balkinization

Richard Shelby, an extortionate thug

By Jack M. Balkin

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I apologized to Ben Nelson and even, kind of, to Joe Lieberman, for earlier referring them (in a post that I then deleted) as "thugs." But I do think that the word is appropriate for Richard Shelby, who, as Jack (and the Washington Post) described below, is holding up the Senate in order to gain what Chicago-types call "rents" from the national government, i.e., a presumptively unnecessary venture to provide jobs for his constituents in the name of honoring "national defense." Yes, I know that politics involves lots of logrolling, compromise, and all of that. No one is pure, and money, including earmarks, as Jesse Unruh once said, is the mother's mild of politics. That being said, Senator Shelby is willing to destroy the United States as a functioning government--given that it really is necessary to have heads of agencies and the like--in order to gain his objectives. We might even describe him as a terrorist instead of a thug.

The point is that it is incumbent on the Senate to do something about this, and NOW. It is not simply a question of shaming, for that assumes that thugs are sensitive to shame. He should be formally censured for "abuse of the rules of the Senate" and, if he refuses to withdraw the holds, expelled from the Senate. (Note that the Senate has the same plenary authority to expel as to set its own rules.) Perhaps we should be grateful to the thuggish Senator from Alabama, for he is indeed bringing the contemporary crisis of the Senate, what even more moderate establishment types like Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann have labeled "The Broken Branch," to a boil. If the Senate doesn't act, then there should indeed be mass action by the public that is seeing its government disintegrate in front of its very eyes (if only they can look).

Full post as published by Balkinization on February 05, 2010 (boomark / email).