Now In The Minority, Republicans Suddenly Find Religion on Wonders of Filibusters and Evils of Majority Rule

I also noticed Steve at The Carpetbagger Report had already posted something I intended to write about today as Republicans - who wanted to end the practice of filibusters when they were in the majority - threaten to filibuster any attempt to block Bush's "surge" (along with anything else they don't like) and whine that they can't still be the rulers of everything now that Dems have the majority. Here:

>For the last few years, congressional Republicans would cry “obstructionism!” at the drop of a hat. Any effort to stand in the way of the president’s agenda in Congress was outrageous, offensive, and possibly even unconstitutional. What mattered, more than anything, was preserving the notion of majority rule. To filibuster was to be un-American.

That was then. Have you noticed how the GOP has suddenly rediscovered its appreciation for standing in the way of the majority?

Back when he was in the Senate majority, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell thought it was pretty outrageous that Democrats were using the threat of filibusters to set up a 60-vote requirement for the confirmation of a handful of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. McConnell called the Democrats’ tactics an “ugly denial” of “fundamental fairness” that was “unprecedented in the history of the country” and would cause “great damage” to the U.S. Senate.

Now that the Republicans are in the minority, it turns out that using filibusters to force 60-vote cloture votes is nothing other than standard operating procedure. The Senate is set to debate competing anti-escalation resolutions next week, and McConnell tells MSNBC that all of them “are likely, as virtually everything in the Senate is likely, to be subject to a 60-vote threshold.”

Remind me, what was that the GOP was saying about “obstructionism”?