If you're talking about the "Gang of 14" thing, it was to preserve the power of the Senate minority to impede the majority as needed. The rationale at the time was that Republicans were not going to be the majority forever, so it would be the height of foolishness to remove their ability to obstruct Democrat progress later because of Republican overconfidence now.
I disagree. The country was founded on the principle of majority rule with RESPECT to minority rights. This applies to both the congress AND the people it governs. However, in the last century, special interest groups have been shifting the focus almost all the way to minority rights and the entire concept of majority rule is (in my opinion) vanishing.
What do you have when any minority has more pull with government than the majority? You have the very type of government our founders were trying to avoid.
If any party, Republican or Democrat, wins enough seats in government by the will of the people, they should be able to pass whatever legislation they promised without any hinderance. The President's judicial nominees should have been given (according to law) a fair up or down vote with a 51% majority required for confirmation. Because of the threat of the Senate filibuster, that majority was effectively raised to the cloture minimum. McCain should have stood with the rest of the party and removed the precendent for filibuster on judicial nominees, but instead, he gave power to the opposing party that they hadn't won in the previous election.
Considering how badly Karl Rove and George W. Bush have hobbled the Republican party for the next few years -- roughly twice as many people voted in the Dem primaries on Super Tuesday than Republicans, to give you a taste of how the general election might go down -- I'd say McCain made the right call.
Which is exactly why conservatives don't like him. We want someone with the balls to say, no, democrats - this is the *right* way to do something, I'm not compromising. Every since Bush the First, Republicans have caved to Democratic pressure even when we held the majority, and the conservative base has hated them for it. The reverse has never been true. I'll say that about Pelosi. As much as I may personally despise her, she stands by her own principles and doesn't compromise.
I dislike the current President
in some ways for the same reason. He's done the same thing on border security that his father did on taxes. His father at least had the excuse of a first-term president trying to get re-elected. Bush II has no such excuse.
And for the record, had I been old enough to vote in the 2000 primary, my candidate wouldn't have been Bush, it would have been Alan Keyes.
One of my own senators, Robert Byrd, was in on that. Say what you want about him, but the man reveres the Senate and isn't going to see it hamstrung for the ideological purity of either side. I'm not pleased by some of the confirmations that went through because of them, but I understand why they did it.
The ideological purity of either side is why they win votes - and the voters who support them want to see that take effect in government. So far, even with bulldogs like Newt, it hasn't happened.
Were I the RNC chair, I would have made sure that the Republican members participating in the Gang of 14 had signed their own political death warrent. I would have personally made sure that strong republican opponents were groomed in their own state, and I would have brought the full power of the party against them the next time their senate seat was up for grabs.
