America Is One Step Closer to a One-Party Tyranny

November 21, 2013, may be another date that will live in infamy.  Instead of conventional bombs and aerial torpedoes exploding at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the “nuclear option” went off in the U.S. Senate at Washington, D.C.

By a 52-48 vote, the Senate voted to change the institution’s regulations related to the filibuster, thereby emasculating a political minority’s ability to thwart, or at least delay, majoritarian dictatorship.  A Senate minority can no longer thwart the president’s nominations of judges to lesser federal courts or of executive department officials.

Although the filibuster can still be used in cases of nominations for the Supreme Court and of substantive legislation, the Senate’s historic power of “advise and consent” has been narrowed to just “consent” in many, perhaps most, cases.  The Senate, once said to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, has been reduced to the president’s rubber stamp.  Furthermore, if the Senate’s rules — originally written by Thomas Jefferson — can be changed at the majority leader’s whim, what is to prevent them being altered again, even to the point of eliminating the filibuster, which used to be called “the soul of the Senate”?

If Harry Reid’s assault on representative government, which was probably an attempt to distract public opinion from ObamaCare, remains in place, American politics will be forever changed…for the worse.

To comprehend the severity of the damage Reid and his minions have done, we need to explore the nature of representative government.

Whether the American regime is called a democracy — the most widely used term — or a representative republic — a less often used, but more accurate, descriptor — it must confront a dilemma that is virtually “baked into” this form of government: the inevitable tension between majority rule and minority rights.