Remember all the threats to use the “nuclear option” when Democrats planned to filibuster Bush’s racist, sexist, homophobic judicial nominees? No one was pushing harder for it than Majority Leader Sen. Bill Frist.
Well, the worm–in this case, the cat-killing, TV screen-diagnosing, state medical board-deceiving Dr. Frist–has had a change of heart about the use of the filibuster. He has announced that Republicans in the Senate will indeed filibuster the bill dealing with detainee interrogation unless a few rebels from his own party rewrite sections of it opposed by George W. Bush.
The senators–John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham–are opposed to the loosening of meaning of the Geneva Conventions ban on torture and other inappropriate treatment of prisoners. From the Washington Post:
For a bill to pass, Frist said, “it’s got to preserve our intelligence programs,” including the CIA’s aggressive interrogation techniques, and it must “protect classified information from terrorists.” He said that “the president’s bill achieves those two goals” but that “the Warner-McCain-Graham bill falls short.”
So…there are the priorities of the Senate’s Republican leader. When it comes to getting around the Geneva Conventions, anything is okay–even the filibuster.
