The U.S. Senate, according to Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, “is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.”

Those were the days.

The Gorsuch Dispute

Since his nomination to the Supreme Court, we have learned from some of America’s leading “statesmen,” to use de Tocqueville’s word, that Neil Gorsuch is a rare incarnation of horror, a human weapon of mass destruction aimed at the very heart of America.

“An extreme ideologue on the court will threaten privacy rights including women’s health care, worker and consumer protections, and public health and safety,” warned Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

Gorsuch is “an ideological and extreme nominee (named) to satisfy the far right. This is a stolen seat being filled by an illegitimate and extreme nominee, and I will do everything in my power to stand up against this assault on the Court,” sputtered Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley.

And I thought Gorsuch, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, confirmed by the Senate unanimously (that include then-Senator Barack Obama and current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) to a federal judgeship just a few years ago, was such a nice guy.

Senate Democrats are, like their counterparts in the House, beside themselves. Their grand, multi-decade enterprise — the creation of a controlling federal government that supersedes, whether through the federal courts or legislation or rule-making, all other public and private venues — is at risk. The elitist Left believes in its vision of Leviathan much as orthodox Christians believe in the Apostle’s Creed. For the Right to be in power is, to them, like allowing heretics to rewrite the Bible. 

The elitist Left believes in its vision of Leviathan much as orthodox Christians believe in the Apostle’s Creed.

Given their inability to drive legislation through either the houses of the federal Congress or state legislators, the Left has resorted to jamming the federal courts with liberal judges who will give them the victories they want. Thus, the immediate, unwarranted, vicious, and even hysterical attacks on Neil Gorsuch.

Riled by Republicans 

The rise of the Right drove former Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid to distraction. Throwing-off all pretense of decorum and public dignity, Reid regularly took to the Senate floor to rail against all things Republican, to the point that he lost all credibility as a serious legislator in his final years in office. 

FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, last year ran an article titled, “Harry Reid’s Wild Exaggerations.”  Even the liberal rag New Republic, once an important journal of center-Left opinion but now merely an outlet for bitter Leftist petulance, castigated Reid for his “blunt, undisciplined tongue.” Joe Manchin, the moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia, went so far as to call Reid’s vicious statement on the election of Donald Trump “an absolute embarrassment to the Senate as an institution, our Democratic party, and the nation.”

Reid’s successor, Chuck Schumer of New York, was caught on an un-muted phone call with some other Democratic Senators a few years ago uttering this gem: “I always use the word extreme. That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

In fairness, the recent campaign failed to bring great credit to the rhetorical maturity of the Republican Party. President Trump’s capacity for puerile taunts and insults (and some of his competitors’ responses to them) debased public dialog. While these kinds of comments were gratifying to many Americans sick of being suffocated by the genteel fascism of political correctness, they were in themselves destructive to legitimate debate.

The Undoing of Reasoned Debate

Yet the U.S. Senate is, ostensibly, the single greatest forum in the world for reasoned, articulate, and informed debate. The windy but earnest Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a Democrat, one-time Senate Majority Leader and the longest serving Senator in our history, said in welcoming the Senate’s 1996 freshmen class, “A Senator must reach for noble qualities — honor, total dedication, self-discipline, extreme selflessness, exemplary patriotism, sober judgment, and intellectual honesty.”

When I served on the staff of then-Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN) in the early ‘90s, my friends and I would often laugh when we heard Sen. Byrd on the Senate floor. His self-conscious emulation of a Roman salon, his consumption of precious debate time with ruminations about his dog, and his florid and boring holdings-forth to which virtually no one paid attention made him an object of our then-youthful derision.

I now look back on those days with a bit of fondness: At least, then, Senators were civil, and Senator Byrd had enough respect for the institution and its duties to temper his well-known partisanship with expressions of courtesy and personal regard.

Enter Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the anti-capitalist with a net worth of $14.5 million, who was on the Senate floor a few days ago castigating now Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Mr. Sessions was, as of that moment, a Senate colleague of hers for more than four years. During this time she had never had occasion to raise his malignant grotesquery to America’s body politic, but I guess she finally summoned the moral courage to relieve herself of her long-simmering outrage.

To give Sen. Warren a pass for violating a crucial rule of Senate decorum would have been a form of rank sexism: Let the little woman have her rant. 

When Sen. Warren began to quote a roughly 30 year-old letter from the late Coretta Scott King in which Mr. Sessions was described in harsh terms, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) invoked a long-held and, to senators, well-known rule Senate Rule 19, which says, “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”

Good for Sen. McConnell. As a lawyer friend said to me today, quoting someone else in order to defame another person is still defamation. The unctuous and bombastic Sen. Warren violated a crucial rule of Senate decorum. Not to rebuke her for this, to give her a pass, would have been a form of rank sexism: Let the little woman have her rant. 

Yet now she is a liberal icon, a brave woman picked on by those mean male Republicans.

Nothing But a Hyperbolic Circus 

Following the horrific martyrdom of Massachusetts’ gift to the Upper Chamber, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) called attention to the general inability of Americans to discuss things civilly in our time in a thoughtful, intense Senate speech.

“What’s at stake here,” he said in the context of the Warren-McConnell matter, “is not simply some rule but the ability of the most important nation on earth to debate in a productive and respectful way the pressing issues before it.”

More specifically, he noted the role of the U.S. Senate as the single most important place in the country where serious, honest, respectful, and constructive debate could be held:

I don’t know of a single nation in this history of the world that’s been able to solve its problems when half the people in the country absolutely hate the other half of the people in that country. This is the most important country in the word, and people in this body (the Senate) cannot function if people are offending one another and that’s why those rules are in place. The linchpin of that debate is the ability of this institution through unlimited debate and the decorum necessary for that debate, to be able to conduct itself in that manner.

Instead, the Senate is fast becoming just another forum for the Left to carry-on, using committee hearings as political smack-downs and floor debates as circuses of hyperbolic invective.

Many years ago I saw the late Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin sitting on a bench outside the Senate Chamber. As the light came through an elegantly framed window, Sen. Heflin, a courtly Southerner, was reading something in the quiet of the ornate foyer. Alone in the courtroom of his mind, he was actually sitting and thinking.

It is not unreasonable to wonder if such scenes will soon become merely fond memories in a Senate mirroring a country riven by ever sharper philosophical, policy, partisan, and moral divisions.