North Korea can just hang on a minute - we're talking about Renee Zellweger's wedding dress

Mark Twain put it quite well when he pointed out, “If con is the opposite of pro, then isn’t congress the opposite of progress?” We have seen more political insanity over the last five years than I dare say we have in many decades past and it looks like it will most surely continue until we elect someone in 2008 who can, perhaps, pronounce the word “nuclear” better than the average second grade student. But regardless of what happens in a few years, there is one tradition of our legislative branch that has survived throughout our nation’s history that is as strange now as it must have been back then. I speak, of course, about the filibuster.

What is a filibuster? Put quite succinctly by CNN, “The filibuster is a parliamentary tactic where senators use their right to virtually unlimited debate to block measures or legislation. To stop a filibuster requires 60 votes. Passing a bill or confirming a nominee requires only a simple majority, 51 senators if all 100 senators are present.” We are currently the most powerful nation in the world with the ability to wipe any nation off the face of the planet (as the Bush administration has so deftly demonstrated) and we are capable of conquering any dream, even that of putting a man on the moon. This is, of course, unless a senator decides he is not going to stop talking until the most powerful nation in the world can agree to make him shut up. And not just agree - it takes more votes to silence a renegade representative than it does to appoint a lifetime justice on the Supreme Court.

This is relevant now because the Senate is preparing to filibuster in order to block Bush’s nominations for successors to the Supreme Court. This happened during the Bush administration's first term and now the Democrats are gearing up for another all-out talkfest in order to have some effect over our nation's policy. Don’t get me wrong, I am positive that any of Bush’s nominees would be detrimental to the future of this country, but isn’t there a better way to get things done than to read from Martha Stewart Living in hopes that your opponents will kill themselves before they vote against you?

Now, if the thought of having Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid read every entry in his little black book doesn’t scare you, perhaps these folks will. This group of Princeton students has decided to show support for the Democratic filibuster by hosting their own blabber bash outside the Frist Campus Center, the same building that the family of the Senate’s head Republican paid to build, soon to be followed by a bus tour to the reflecting pool on the Mall. These students, while exercising their right of free speech, are not encouraging the Democrats to step out of their passive shells and do something, but instead are supporting this time-honored embarrassment. True, the Democrats are in the minority and they must pull out every stop they can in order to keep the Republicans from running them over, but perhaps they should have thought about that come election time instead of trying to speak endlessly on irrelevant topics now. The Democrats are paying the price for not taking a stand on any of the major issues in order to please the entire free world at once while cowering in the shadow of the ambitious Republicans. And I’m sure everyone who voted for John Kerry and Al Gore in the primaries would agree.

But even more astonishing is that, according to this CNN report, people like Democratic New Jersey representatives Rush Holt and Frank Pallone Jr. have actually shown up to participate in the Princeton protest. I suppose for some people there is not enough absurdity in the capitol and they must travel to college rallies to satisfy their urges. If you can’t get anything done by going on about a random subject in Washington D.C., then you had better do it some more with a bunch of anxious twenty-year-olds.

Yes, we need to stop George Bush and Carl Rove from making these nominations to the Supreme Court. Yes, the Democrats need to come up from behind to have their minority voice heard. But do we really need to pay homage to this ludicrous American tradition? As the most powerful nation on Earth it is our responsibility to come up with a more appropriate forum for the battles of politics. If you're going to vote, then vote. If you're going to debate, then please let's have a frank and relevant discussion. But it makes very little sense that spending days at a time literally talking about nonsense is a valid procedure recognized by our government and that a floundering Democratic party should even think to engage. Of course the upside is that I have always wanted to read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace so I'm hoping it will be on the suggested reading list while I'm glued to C-Span.