Sen. Max Baucus today offered the rhetorical antithesis to Sen. Santorum’s crass reference to Adolph Hitler. Read it, pass it on to friends. It is a powerful, jarring speech, one that expresses the profound importance of the moment we’re experiencing now.

Mr. President, last week, on Wednesday, we evacuated the Capitol. At the instruction of the Capitol Police, more than a few Senators and staff actually ran from this building and the surrounding offices in the very real fear that a plane was carrying a bomb to attack this building, the center of our democracy.

Sadly, Wednesday was not the first time. And Wednesday will likely not be the last time, that we guard against threats to our democracy by plane and bomb.

But there are other threats to our democracy and our freedoms, just as menacing, equally as dangerous.

Abraham Lincoln said: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

Former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin said: “It is not slogans or bullets, but only institutions, that can make, and keep, people free.”

And Baron Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws: “There is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and the executive.” …

Mr. President, in ancient Rome, when the Senate lost its power, and the emperor became a tyrant, it was not because the emperor abolished the Senate. In ancient Rome, when the Senate lost its power, it continued to exist, at least in name. But in ancient Rome, when the Senate lost its power, in the words of the Senate’s historian, Senator Robert Byrd, the Senate became “little more than a name.”

In ancient Rome, when the Senate lost its power, the Roman Senate was complicit in the transfer. The emperor did not have to seize all the honors and powers. The Roman Senate, one after another, conferred greater powers on Caesar.

It was not the abolition of the Senate that made the emperor powerful. It was the Senate’s complete deference.

Like the Roman Senate before us, we risk bringing our diminution upon ourselves. We risk bringing upon ourselves a hollow Senate, a mere shadow of its past self. And we risk bringing upon ourselves a loss of the checks and balances that ensure our American democracy. …

Mr. President:

This is the way democracy ends;
This is the way democracy ends;
This is the way democracy ends;
Not with a bomb, but a gavel.

A few minutes ago, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) went on to the Senate floor and compared those who opposed the nuclear option to Hitler.

On March 1, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) made a reference to Hitler in a speech about the nuclear option. Santorum lashed out at Byrd for his remarks. From the 3/11/05 Charleston Journal:

Byrd roused the ire of many Republicans when he tangentially referred to Adolf Hitler during a speech on March 1 defending cloture and the right to debate.

[Snip]

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., asked Byrd to retract his comments, stating they “lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate.” The Anti-Defamation League also criticized Byrd.

What a difference 10 weeks make.

UPDATE: Watch the video of Santorum on the floor today.

While Vermont moved one step closer to universal health care, Maryland took a big step back today. Governor Bob Ehrlich vetoed legislation that would have required for-profit companies with more than 10,000 employees to spend 8 percent of their payroll on health-care benefits. As the legislation was written, Wal-Mart was the only business in the state who failed to meet those standards, but as the Philadelphia Inquirer writes, the company is in a “class by itself” due to the “unusually high” number of employees without company-paid health benefits. Despite the fact the bill would have helped address the issue of nearly 600,000 Maryland residents who lack health care, Gov. Ehrlich “enthusiastically veto[d]” the legislation, somehow finding it “irresponsible” to provide his neediest constituents with much-needed help.

WCAX Vermont reports that “the Vermont Senate has given preliminary approval to a sweeping reform of the state’s health care system.” By a vote of 21 to six, “the Senate approved a new program they call Green Mountain Health” that “will provide primary and preventative care to all uninsured Vermonters beginning in July 2006.”

The bill now needs to be ironed out with Vermont House legislators, who passed their own version earlier. But the big question is whether Republican Gov. Jim Douglas will veto the measure. Douglas has significant ties to the health care industry. But does he want to be the governor whose legacy is preventing Vermont from becoming the first state in America to enact universal health care? Stay tuned.

Derrick Max is the executive director of two supposedly independent, nonpartisan groups, the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (part of the National Association of Manufacturers) and the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America’s Social Security, affiliated with the Business Roundtable. He’s a staunch supporter of overhauling Social Security.

He’s also not very good at working his computer.

When Max emailed his testimony on Social Security to the Senate, he forgot to turn off “track changes.” Whoops. Turns out the White House left its fingerprints all over his document.

The associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Andrew Biggs — who’s currently on loan, working out of the White House — edited Max’s now-not-so-nonpartisan testimony, making corrections, ensuring it matched the Bush line. Max forgot to erase the evidence of White House involvement in his “independent” testimony.

Note to the White House: When you’re looking for your next syncophant, make sure you pick a guy who knows how to work Microsoft Word.

As they advance their nuclear option agenda, one of the most favored talking points of the radical right wing is that that the Senate has never denied an up-or-down vote to a judicial nominee once that nominee reached the Senate floor. Bill Frist made this point yesterday:

Never in 214 years of Senate history had a judicial nominee with majority support been denied an up-or-down vote.

How did these judicial nominees even get to the Senate floor? Before a judicial nominee ever reaches the floor, he or she must pass through the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rule IV of the Senate Judiciary Committee states:

The Chairman shall entertain a non-debatable motion to bring a matter before the Committee to a vote. If there is objection to bring the matter to a vote without further debate, a rollcall vote of the Committee shall be taken, and debate shall be terminated if the motion to bring the matter to a vote without further debate passes with ten votes in the affirmative, one of which must be cast by the minority.

In other words, debate on a judicial nominee can end only if a rollcall vote obtains at least one vote from the minority party. Proposed by Republicans and enacted in 1979, Rule IV has been upheld for 24 years and by five different chairmen of both parties.

In 1997, when Clinton’s nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, Bill Lann Lee, came to a floor vote, Senator Hatch said:

Rule IV of the Judiciary Committee rules effectively establishes a committee filibuster right… Absent the consent of a minority member of the Committee, a matter may not be brought to a vote.

On February 27, 2003, then-Chairman Orrin Hatch threw this rule out the window and employed his own mini-nuclear option. When faced with upholding this rule during the committee hearing for Jeffrey Sutton, Deborah Cook and John Roberts (three controversial circuit court nominees), Hatch went against his own previous statement, overrode the rule, and said to the minority: “[Y]ou have no right to continue a filibuster in this committee.” The nominations moved out of committee, paving the path for the nominees currently being debated on the Senate floor, Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen, to clear the Committee by a strictly party-line vote.

So next time you hear right-wingers say this is the first time that the Senate has failed to give an up-or-down vote to a nominee on the floor, remember that it was because they employed the mini-nuclear option and circumvented the Judiciary Committee rules.

President Bush’s Social Security plans just suffered another serious blow. Robert Pozen, whose “progressive indexing” plan was firmly endorsed by the president at a high-profile press conference last month, has said that Bush should drop his plans for private accounts.

Just out from CQ, password req’d:

[Pozen] said Wednesday that Bush should “back away” from the other half [of his Social Security plans] — the insistence that individual investment accounts be created in the program. …

“I would advise the president to say that carve-out accounts are no longer required,” Pozen said in an interview after a debate at the American Enterprise Institute with Brookings Institution scholar Peter R. Orszag, a leading critic of Bush’s proposal. Bush, Pozen said, should indicate that he is “willing to have a package that, if otherwise satisfactory, does not have carve-out accounts.”

Not only that, Pozen challenged the wider theme that Bush has used to justify private accounts:

For many conservatives, the philosophical importance of creating accounts from the payroll tax cannot be understated. They believe it would turn many lower-income workers into investors, ushering in a new “ownership society”…

Pozen disagrees. … Talk of an “ownership society,” Pozen said Wednesday, is “a weak basis” for arguing for an overhaul.