In politics, you can never go wrong when the founding fathers are on your side. Mario Cuomo put this theory to the test in the Democrats' weekly radio address today, reports the Associated Press:

If Republicans rewrite Senate rules to more easily end filibusters, the country will experience "exactly the kind of `tyranny of the majority' that James Madison had in mind," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo said Saturday.

Cuomo, in the Democratic Party's weekly radio address, said Senate Republicans "are threatening to claim ownership of the Supreme Court and other federal courts, hoping to achieve political results on subjects like abortion, stem cells, the environment and civil rights that they cannot get from the proper political bodies."

"How will they do this? By destroying the so-called filibuster, a vital part of the 200-year-old system of checks and balances in the Senate," Cuomo said.

"The Republicans say it would assure dominance by the majority in the Senate," he said. "That sounds democratic until you remember that the Bill of Rights was adopted, as James Madison pointed out, to protect all of Americans from what he called the `tyranny of the majority.'"

"It sounds nearly absurd when you learn that the minority Democrats in the Senate actually represent more Americans than the majority Republicans do," Cuomo said.

The Madisonian line of attack is an effective one for Dems, but so too is Cuomo's last quote. As Chris Bowers has noted here and other places, even though the Dems lost seats in 2004, they actually received more votes than the Republicans. Go figure.