A Bad Writer Bites Back

[Peter Kilander]

>Here's a taste of how the NYT op-ed process works. My friend Dan Lazare
>wrote an op-ed piece thrashing the U.S. constitutional system (which he's
>done at length in his book The Frozen Republic and in an article in New
>Left Review #232, to which Michael Lind responds in #233). One of the op-ed
>editors was interested, but she said they wanted to run it past Anthony
>Lewis and Ronald Dworkin, who stand for everything Dan write against. Of
>course they didn't like it, and the piece never ran.

I was very impressed with the nlr article. Thomas Geoghegan, in his new book
The Secret Lives of Citizens, complains about the Senate also. He argues
that through the filibuster, Republican Senators had blocked many
progressive reforms that made it to the Senate during the Carter and Clinton
years.  I distinctly remember the filibuster against the anti-worker
replacement bill back in the mid-'90s. I think it was after the Republicans
had taken the Congress, though.