E.J. Dionne is a weeny.

Not very grown up of me, I’ll admit. But what else do you call someone who, when it comes to elections and governance, decides to make up the rules as we go along instead of adhering to to time honored traditions and history?

Should a temporary majority of 50.7 percent have control over the entire United States government? Should 49.3 percent of Americans have no influence over the nation’s trajectory for the next generation?

Like a spoiled brat of a child, Dionne is throwing a tantrum because the Republicans are seeking to (gasp!) control all three branches of government by putting a conservative or two on the Supreme Court. Evidently, Mr. Dionne has a novel view about elections: The Republican majority isn’t large enough to justify governing the country.

Many Republicans are already saying that since Bush won the last election and since Republicans control the Senate, the president’s choice should be confirmed with dispatch. But as former judge Robert Bork wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court “is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy.” Today’s Republican majority, based on Bush’s 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004, has no inherent right to exercise near-total control over that “most powerful branch.”

Of course, Mr. Dionne’s thesis begs the question – um, just how large a majority would justify Republican governance? Since Mr. Dionne doesn’t answer the question, I’ll do it for him.

Exactly one more vote than your guy got.

We call this democracy. If your guy had gotten one more vote than our guy, then he would be the one sitting in the Big Chair making the selection that would have a minority party controlling two thirds of the federal government.

See how this thing cuts both ways?

Of course, if the situation were reversed I doubt whether we’d hear you caterwauling about “consultation” or other Democratic code words for obstructionism. Then again, if the confirmation shoe was on your foot, I have no doubt that you would use these numbers to justify nominating the most far left judges imaginable:

Consider that since 1992 the Republican presidential vote has averaged only 44 percent and the vote for Republican House candidates has averaged roughly 48 percent. In 2004, with large margins in some of the largest states, Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate received nearly 5 million more votes than their Republican opponents.

Those numbers don’t change the fact that the GOP controls both the White House and the Senate. But they do suggest that the Republicans owe a decent respect to the opinions of the Democratic minority and have no mandate for pushing the court far to the right. Yes, this is a “political” assertion. But debates over Supreme Court nominations have been political throughout our history.

Mr. Dionne now refuses to reveal what his threshold for “mandate” would be. I recall following President Reagan’s electoral slaughter of Walter Mondale in the 1984 election, Democrats refused to acknowledge any mandate for the winner of 58% of ballots cast and 525 out of 538 electoral votes. After all (their logic went) , if one were to include every American eligible to vote (along with every dog, cat, and bunny rabbit) Mr. Reagan received less than 50% support of the American people. This was a time when Americans still took the Democratic party seriously unlike today where Democrats have become the punchline to a national joke.

A “mandate” in a democracy is when your guy gets one more vote than the other guy. This is based on the simple idea that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. If one more of the governed gives their consent to be governed by the winner of an election, that’s as big a mandate as any landslide in political history. Any other formulation will not work. To try and make up new rules simply because your ideas and candidates have been rejected by 50% plus 1 of the electorate may be emotionally necessary but hardly a sound basis to conduct the business of the republic.

Yes, the minority has “rights” – or rather the minority view is “protected.” This protection takes the form of procedural rules like the filibuster in the Senate and (formerly) a strong federalist bent that gave certain powers to states that didn’t vote for the majority candidate. I find it interesting that Democrats are talking about “checks and balances” in the Senate as “Constitutional.” As every 12th grader in my day had to know before they could graduate high school, the “checks and balances” in the Constitution referred to the 3 separate but equal branches of government and had no relationship whatsoever to the transient nature of political power in one branch or another. This seems to have escaped the attention of the clueless Mr. Dionne.

Finally, Mr. Dionne advocates the Borking of any nominee as a last resort to keep the dastardly Republicans from seizing control of the government altogether and exercising the power granted them by the electorate in the last election:

Those who say that politics, philosophy and “issues” shouldn’t be part of the confirmation argument typically bemoan the prospect of a mean and dirty fight. But if the only legitimate way to stop a nominee is to discover or allege some personal shortcoming, all the incentives are in favor of nasty ad hominem attacks. If senators disagree profoundly with the philosophy of a nominee who happens to be a perfectly decent human being, isn’t it far better that they wage their battle openly on philosophical and political grounds? Why force them to dig up bad stuff on a good person? Paradoxically, denying that politics matter in confirmation battles makes for uglier politics.

A “legitimate” way to stop a nominee is to “discover or allege” (lie) some personal foible? One would hope that shooting the nominee would at least fall under Mr. Dionne’s definition of “illegitimate” because throwing crap against the wall to see if anything sticks is a helluva way to fight the nomination of a Justice to the United States Supreme Court. This tactic is not only beneath contempt, it reveals how desperately the Democrats and their gaggle of interest groups need to stop a conservative from being confirmed. The apocalyptic rhetoric of NOW, ANSWER, and the alphabet soup of special pleaders who call the Democratic party home makes a little more sense when placed in the context that it would be perfectly legitimate to make something up about a nominee in order to defeat them.

Mr. Dionne has given us fair warning that the coming fight over the next Justice to the United States Supreme Court is going to be a bloody one. And it also appears that the Democrats may be perfectly willing to filibuster any nominee who would reflect even a moderate conservative philosophy – especially if that philosophy was disagreeable to the interest groups whose hold on the elected officials in that party is now total and complete.

UPDATE

Polipundit also takes Dionne to task for his curious ideas regarding democracy:

So I guess we should all just forget about that election thingy. I’m sure Dionne would say the same thing if Kerry had won, and if Democrats – rather than Republicans – had gained four seats in the US Senate in 2004. Right? Right?

Not to belabor the point, but Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff also sees the hypocrisy dripping from this aricle. It says something revealing about the MSM that liberal columnists still feel secure enough that they can write this drivel with impunity.

UPDATE 7/12

David Limbaugh makes many of the same points that I do in his royal reaming of Mr. Dionne and adds this:

The answers to E.J.’s questions are these: No, a relatively narrow majority (nor an overwhelming majority, for that matter) does not have an inherent right to exercise near-total control over the “entire U.S. government” or “that ‘most powerful branch.’” It is entitled to precisely that amount of influence it is able to muster under the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the president is entitled to appoint judges, and the Senate has the advice and consent power.

Senators of the majority party are not required to push their agenda with only 50.7 percent intensity. It’s an adversary system—they may promote their views with 100 percent of their energy, and it is up to the minority party to advocate their dissenting views.

Elections have consequences E.J. – except when Republicans win, eh?