Nobody Has Any Procedural Beliefs, Tudor Edition

Evidently during the 1550s, a whole lot of Protestants went about attacking the concept of female rule. They did this in quite ugly misogynistic terms. Why did they do this? Were they just a bunch of sexist bastards? Well, yeah, I suppose they were, just on general principles if nothing else. But there's another good explanation for this position: at the time, England was ruled by a Catholic woman, Mary Tudor, and Scotland was ruled by an absent Catholic woman, Mary Stewart, and a Catholic female governor, Mary of Guise. "Catholic" was probably a lot more important than "woman" in making people like John Knox hate them. So, of course they inveighed against female rule. It suited their partisan agenda at the time. Then, oops, we've got a Protestant woman on the English throne, for, oh hey, forty years. And she remembers that John Knox et al. spent the last decade railing against female rule, and she naturally doesn't like him very much. But he'd like to like her, because hey, she's on his side!

This is a nice example of my idea that nobody has any very firm beliefs about structural or procedural issues. It's just so damn easy to adopt whichever belief on such an issue aligns with the immediate circumstances of your partisan or ideological cause. Republicans trash the filibuster as undemocratic in 2005, and then set records for use of the filibuster in 2010. And, yes, Democrats including myself were on the opposite side of this issue at both times, although I still think there's a quasi-defensible justification for being pro-2005 filibusters and anti-2010 filibusters, namely that in 2005 the 45 Democrats represented more people than the 55 Republicans. We can see this a lot in constitutional law, where veeeery few people manage to hold consistent views across all federalism issues (including Scalia, see Gonzalez v. Raich) or separation-of-powers issues. It's just plain hard to hold fast to a belief about a distribution-of-power issue when your belief tells you to take the power away from the person who agrees with you and give it to the person who disagrees with you. And it always has been.