It's All How You Frame It

Sam Rosenfield, writing at TAPPED, the blog of liberal magazine The American Prospect, bemoans, if not the judicial compromise itself, at least the way it has come to be viewed, using a segment of Hardball as a case in point:

Chris Matthews interviewed Senator Mike DeWine about the courageous Gang of 14 and their plans for the upcoming Supreme Court fight. The interview really illustrated the degree to which the Gang's nuclear option deal has successfully come to be framed in the last two months as an agreement that delegitimized filibusters rather than the nuclear option. This is a disaster from the standpoint of the Democrats (and a huge failure in post-deal spinning on the part of the seven Democratic Gangmembers)....

Not once during the entire interview was the subject of the nuclear option ever raised. But why should it have been? The Gang's original reason for forming -- the feeling that the nuclear option was such an unprecedented breach of procedure that an agreement simply had to be reached to avoid its detonation -- seems to have been forgotten by the Matthews set. The group is now seen as just a band of thoughtful moderates who found a way to stop all those terrible judicial filibusters.

I've yet to hear a convincing argument for even one negative consequence of fili-deal for the Republican side, but hardly a day goes by that I don't hear of several for the Democrats...