Posted on 03/31/2003 10:04:17 PM PST by mikeb704
It was last February 12 in Washington. Memories of romance were in the air:
"I graduated from high school in 1934. I liked a pretty, pretty girl, too. She was not in my class. She was in the next class behind me, and she was the daughter of a coal miner. And that coal miner played a fiddle. His name was Fred James.
I took a liking to that daughter of the coal miner. And I tell you, you young ladies, and young men as well, who are pages here, I tell you how I courted my girl, my sweetheart, how I won her hand in marriage.
There was another boy in my class at Mark Twain High School in 1934. His name was Julius Takach. His father had a grocery store at Ury, what we called Cooktown, about 3 miles south of Stotesbury where I lived. And Julius Takach would, every morning, come to school with his pockets filled with that candy and chewing gum, bubble gum, and so on, from his father's store.
Now, I tell you, I made it my business to be the first to greet Julius at the schoolhouse door upon his arrival every day because he would give me some of that candy and chewing gum.
I tell you, it was something to be able to present your girl, your sweetheart, a piece of bubble gum. And I never let her know that I did not buy that, I did not purchase that gum or candy. I did not let her know it was given to me, but it was given to me by Julius Takach.
I would meet her when the classes changed, and I would give her that candy and chewing gum. Boy, what a hit I thought I was, giving that pretty girl that candy and chewing gum."
This charming anecdote was related by Senator Robert Byrd (D- W. VA) on the Senate floor. What in the world, one may ask, do Byrd’s reminiscences have to do with the official business of that esteemed body?
Quite a lot, as it turns out. For the senator was participating in a long-time tradition of the Senate, the filibuster.
Almost two years ago President Bush nominated Miguel Estrada to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. If approved, he’d be the first Hispanic on a court that has been a stepping-stone to the Supreme Court. Mr. Estrada is an excellent candidate with a Horatio Alger success story and the American Bar Association’s highest rating.
Senate Democrats aren’t satisfied. They see Mr. Estrada as too conservative and have filibustered his nomination. Engaging in "extended discussion," the Democrats intend to talk the nomination to death. "We will not relent on the matter," says Democrat leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
Breaking a filibuster requires a supermajority of 60 votes, a requirement not easy to attain in a Senate with only 51 Republicans. Complicating matters is that the Estrada appointment isn’t subjected to a genuine, round the clock, senators sleeping on cots in the hallway so they can vote in the middle of the night type filibuster. Rather, it’s a modified one, with an hour or two a day being devoted to the question of Miguel Estrada and then normal business the rest of the time.
The filibuster device has been used for good and bad through the years and I don’t advocate its elimination. I’d think, though, that Democrats would be more sensitive about using it, especially against a qualified minority.
For many years Democrats used the filibuster, or the threat of one, to keep from passing civil rights legislation. Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, set the record in 1957 by speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes against a civil rights bill. It eventually passed, but it had been 82 years since the last civil rights legislation had been approved.
Another Democrat of the era, Mississippi’s James Eastland, was chairman of the judiciary committee. According to Robert Caro, author of comprehensive biographies of Lyndon Johnson, Eastland thought filibusters could be staged not just on the Senate floor, but in committees as well. This view proved helpful to him as he squashed civil rights bills, which fell under his committee’s jurisdiction.
Eastland was an unabashed racist. Caro’s book "Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson" details part of a speech he gave in 1956: "In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers . . . All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of dead niggers."
That as despicable a person as Eastland, who was in the Senate until 1978, should hold a Democratic leadership position is evidence of how many Democrats supported racism, Jim Crow laws, and the oppression of an entire race. Now they are using their old friend the filibuster to hold back another minority.
Republicans shouldn’t make it easy on them. They need to force the issue. Allow no other Senate business to take place until a simple up-or-down vote is taken on Miguel Estrada’s nomination. If the Democrats want to filibuster full-time, the American people will see who the real obstructionists are.
We can all look forward to more of Senator Byrd’s mesmerizing recollections of courtship. Perhaps he’ll even favor us with memories of his days in the Ku Klux Klan. Then again, probably not.
I hope you're correct, but right now his nomination seems to have completely fallen off the screen.
Then they get their brains kicked out and wonder why. I think it was Ben Franklin who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Nor can I. When Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, at her confirmation hearing she declared abortion "something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. . ."
She was confirmed 97 to 3.
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