Demagogue

Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran an analysis piece by Jim VandeHei in which he noted that whenever Bush seeks to push his agenda, he does so by framing it as a response to a "crisis." Of course, those crises never exist, but it helps Bush to intimidate others into doing his bidding.

And it works - which is probably why Orrin Hatch penned a lengthy piece for the National Review in which he defended the GOP's proposal to unilaterally outlaw the filibuster of judicial nominees by invoking the word "crisis" fifteen times.

I am not quite sure what the crisis is exactly, considering that as of today, there are only 37 vacancies among the 875 federal court seats. That is about 4%.

In fact, according to Table 1 of this Congressional Research Service report (pdf format), this is the lowest vacancy rate in terms of number or percentage of open seats since 1985. During the six years Republicans controlled the Senate under Clinton, the number of vacancies averaged around 60 and the percentage of vacant seats averaged 7.5%

So the vacancy rate is, for all intents and purposes, half of what is was under Clinton.

Only now, it has become a "crisis."