Color me unsurprised.

(WARNING: Political comment here. Move on to the non-leftwing stuff immediately below this post, if such is your wont.)

I'm also seeing a lot of mention around Blogistan about the Republican majority in the House of Representatives preparing to dump a rule they themselves initiated when they took over the House in 1995, in which a Representative who is under indictment is no longer allowed to hold a leadership position. This was a stance against the well-publicized corruption of Democrats like Dan Rostenkowski, and in truth, it was a rule that I could support: generally, I would think that people under indictment should not be serving in high leadership positions in our government. But apparently now that the shoe may be on the other foot -- specifically, Tom DeLay may be under indictment soon -- such a rule is suddenly inconvenient to the Republicans. So it's being placed aside.

I can't say as I'm surprised. After all, these are the same Republicans who have changed the rules regarding judicial confirmations whenever they've found the current rules inconvenient, and then whining when Democrats resort to the only weapon left in their arsenal, the filibuster. ("We never filibustered Clinton's judges!" comes the refrain. "We never went that far! Clearly the Democrats are willing to do far worse than we ever were!" And this claim is made, despite the fact that since the Republicans controlled the confirmation process outright, they never had to resort to the filibuster. You don't have to filibuster when you can just never allow the nominations to come to a vote. There's no doubt in my mind that the Republicans would never have hesitated to filibuster Clinton's judges, had it come to that. But there's the rub: it was up to them to keep it from ever coming to that.)

Also, many of these guys are the same folks who took advantage of the "Congressional Term Limits" fetish that was part of the political climate back in 1994, only to then turn around and dump their previous promises to only serve a set number of years and then stop seeking re-election.

So, yeah, color me "unsurprised".