Santorum's Imus Weaselwords

I just ran across this in Don Imus's daily newsletter. This is a segment from the show this past Tuesday.

See how Santorum squirms when the I-Man won't let him out of answering:


Imus: "What are you doing now? Trying to get rid of the filibuster rule?"

Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum: "If you read the filibuster rule and I'm sure you have, it talks about the filibuster cloture being allowed on legislative business. We have two calendars in the Senate..a legislative calendar and an executive calendar. And the executives calendar is an executive session, a completely different thing and that's where we could do nominations. For 214 years no one has ever used a filibuster to block a nominee from coming to vote on the Senate floor until 2 years ago. We don't think that it's right and we think it should go back to the precedent."

Imus: "So you want to change the rules so you can ram through these crazy judges.."

Senator Santorum: "We want to go back to the precedent that it's held for 214 years that has served this country pretty well."

Imus: "It hasn't been a rule for 214 years, it was just never employed."

Senator Santorum: "Well it was a precedent of the Senate. As you know the Senate is run by a lot of things, one of them is precedent and that is how we've done things for years and that is how we have done things for 214 years. The Democrats the last time around changed the precedent and we are trying to get it back."

Imus: "..but not the rule."

Senator Santorum: "We are not going to change the rule either. The way it would work is not a rule change but simply a ruling by the chair that the precedent has been this and that we are going to return to that so it won't be a rule change."