Hitler Rhetoric (Filibuster "Nuclear Option")

Here we go again with the lame "Hitler rhetoric", with the "point man" being the infamous former KKK member -- Senator Robert Byrd said:

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that "Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact." And he succeeded.

Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman released this statement:

Senator Byrd's invocation of Hitler's Germany in discussing the duty of U.S. Senators to advise and provide consent on judicial nominees is reprehensible and beyond the pale. While members of the Senate are free to agree and disagree on the issues, this poisonous rhetoric only serves to illustrate the desperation and weakness of Senator Byrd's position

Senator Byrd also invoked Hollywood by saying "In 1939, one of the most famous American movies of all time, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," hit the box office". Well Senator Byrd the filibuster was originally designed to work like "Mr. Smith's" stand in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington -- which is no longer the case best described by Mr. Limbaugh:

The filibuster used to mean that you had to go to the floor and you had to stand there and you had to talk the whole time you were filibustering. It could be on anything. You could debate this. You know who holds the record for the longest filibuster without going to the bathroom? Strom Thurmond. I forget how many hours but it's like 16 or 18 hours he stood on the Senate floor and filibustered something without breaking. You can't break it.

But that's not a filibuster anymore. All somebody wants to filibuster has to do is say, "Hey, guess what? I'm filibustering yew," and, bam! Debate stops, and it needs 60 votes to stop it. There are no filibusters anymore.