Defending the Filibuster

George Will is defending the right of the Senate minority to filibuster.  As much as I dislike the Democrats' current tactics over Bush's judicial nominees, it's hard to disagree with Will's basic point:  Someday the Republicans will again be in the minority.  Will's solution?

The president should renominate all 10 appellate-court nominees who have been filibustered, and he should vow, like General Grant, to "fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer." Norman Ornstein, a student of these things, says Senate Republicans could force Democrats to conduct the kind of filibuster Southern Democrats conducted against civil-rights legislation in the 1950s—talking around the clock, the obstructionists and their opponents sleeping on cots in the Capitol, the Senate paralyzed. There has never been such a spectacle in the era of C-Span and saturation journalism on cable 24 hours a day. Do Democrats want to make 2005 the year of living dangerously? Seventeen of their 44 seats are at risk in 2006—five of them in states Bush just carried.

I agree.  Beat them within the current rules.