Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Senators Charles E. Schumer, left,
and Lindsey Graham, discussing
legislation outside the Senate chamber
on Thursday.
Posted on 11/01/2003 4:25:26 AM PST by Pharmboy
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Senators Charles E. Schumer, left,
and Lindsey Graham, discussing
legislation outside the Senate chamber
on Thursday.
WASHINGTON — When Charles E. Schumer recommended using an extreme tactic — the filibuster — to block some Bush administration nominees for federal judgeships, he put himself in the cross hairs of the president's Republican and conservative allies.
Over the last two years, Mr. Schumer has used almost every maneuver available to a Senate Judiciary Committee member to block the appointment of the more controversial judges nominated by the Bush administration, drawing fire from the political right for both his method and his success.
As a member of the panel, he has chided certain nominees and their supporters, most famously when he accused Miguel Estrada, a Washington lawyer nominated to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, of stonewalling. He also asked him to cite Supreme Court cases he most admired and deplored. Mr. Estrada refused to answer, earning him the reputation among Democrats as the Bush administration's stealth right-wing candidate.
It was also Mr. Schumer's staff that dug up controversial information about certain Bush nominees and then disseminated it to reporters and Democrats. Among the handouts were the writings of James Leon Holmes, a lawyer and former president of Arkansas Right to Life, who wrote that conception from rape occurs with "the same frequency as snowfall in Miami" and who compared abortion-rights advocates to Nazis.
Most important, people on Capitol Hill say, Mr. Schumer urged Democratic colleagues in the Senate to use a tactic that some were initially reluctant to pursue, and that has since roiled the Senate: a filibuster on the floor of the chamber to block votes on nominees he and other Democrats had decided to oppose. The resulting standoff has Democrats and Republicans on the committee so tense that some joke that they need to come to work with bodyguards.
All of this has made Mr. Schumer, the senior senator from New York, a lightning rod for Republican and right-wing critics, ranking him right up there on the loathing scale with Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York's junior senator, and Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator.
Talk radio, newspaper columns and Internet sites are filled with wrath over what they see as the senator's self-appointment as the arbiter of who is worthy of a federal judgeship. One conservative group has included him in a pack of playing cards as one of the 55 most dangerous liberals in America.
Conservative leaders and columnists have called him anti-Catholic because of his opposition to nominees espousing traditional Catholic values, such as Mr. Estrada and Bill Pryor, the Alabama attorney general. He has also been accused of being anti-Hispanic for opposing Mr. Estrada, and of being anti-black for opposing Janice Rogers Brown, a conservative member of the California Supreme Court.
"It's obvious to me that many of the president's judicial nominees want to return us not just to the 1930's, but to the 1890's," Mr. Schumer said as hearings on the Brown nomination opened last month.
The conservative wing of the Republican Party immediately struck back. Thomas Sowell, the conservative economist and writer, excoriated the senator in a column that ran under the headline "A Lynch Mob Gathers."
"Why this bitter determination to prevent Justice Brown's nomination from even being voted on?" he wrote. He said that Justice Brown came across as "a very thoughtful, intelligent, and articulate black woman" during the hearings. "It could be hard for some senators to go against public opinion and vote against her. To people like shameless Schumer, the obvious answer is to prevent any vote at all."
Some of this has Mr. Schumer puzzled. He sees himself largely as a moderate, and he said he has tried to avoid partisan battles. Some Democrats say the Schumer camp fears that some fights might lead the senator to be marginalized in a Congress that is dominated by Republicans.
Rather, Mr. Schumer has tried to cast himself as a bipartisan pragmatist, in the tradition of one of his political idols, former Senator Jacob K. Javits, a Republican moderate from New York.
He has, in some ways, been so successful that he has drawn criticism from the left for backing other major portions of the Bush agenda, like expanded police powers to combat terrorism, a Congressional resolution authorizing war in Iraq and scores of other Bush judicial nominees.
Political strategists say the moderate reputation he is cultivating provides him political cover to wage an ideological fight over judges and minimizes opposition among New York's moderate swing voters.
Mr. Schumer emphasizes the discretion he says he has used in opposing nominees. He said he picked his battles carefully, blocking only the nominations of those he finds to be out of step with the ideological mainstream of both parties.
The senator, in a recent interview, noted that he has opposed only 11 out of the 159 people the president nominated for seats on the federal bench.
Mr. Schumer also said he actually voted in favor of several nominees whose views are inconsistent with his own, including Jay Bybee, a conservative legal scholar who was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Deborah Cook, a conservative on the Ohio Supreme Court who was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
"You have to pick your shots," he said.
"I don't relish this fight," the senator continued. "Rather, I feel it is something I have to do. It's happening because the president is nominating such far-right nominees."
Some fellow politicians and political strategists said the reaction he has stirred clearly underscored his effectiveness in controlling the debate over the ideological shape of the nation's courts.
"If you fail, you're not a problem to them," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., referring to conservatives. Mr. Biden, a Democrat from Delaware who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation battles over Clarence Thomas and Robert H. Bork, said Mr. Schumer, better than most, knows how to get under conservatives' skin.
"There are some senators who have the same views Chuck has," Mr. Biden said. "But conservatives don't worry about them because they're not effective."
Meanwhile, back home in heavily Democratic New York, it cannot hurt Mr. Schumer much to be slapped with a lefty label. At the same time, he continues to enjoy significant backing even among Republicans in New York.
A recent poll conducted by Quinnipiac College found that Mr. Schumer enjoyed a higher level of support among Republicans (47 percent said they approve of him, while 35 said they do not) than Gov. George E. Pataki, a three-term Republican incumbent, did among Democrats (36 percent said they approve of him, while 52 percent said they do not).
Mr. Schumer can also afford to pick this fight for another important reason, political strategists say. He has amassed nearly $18 million in campaign funds, even as Republicans are scrambling to find a candidate to run against him next year.
Even conservatives in New York, who have criticized Mr. Schumer bitterly for his stance on judges, acknowledge that he is in a strong position politically as he enters an election year.
"Chuck Schumer doesn't have the negatives of a Hillary Clinton," said Michael Long, New York's Conservative Party chairman. But Mr. Long reiterated his long-held contention that Mr. Schumer has shown a bias against judicial candidates who display deeply held Roman Catholic beliefs against abortion and gay rights.
"He's not a bigot," he said. "But he has a very strong bias."
Boy, would it not be great to have a pubbie beat upchuck in the next election.
Red alert!!!
J. Leon Holmes was the lawyer that Pryor (and Daschle?) said, today, should be voted on (very soon) for a judgeship.
Pryor acted all innocent as he "wondered out loud" why Bush's nominee, Holmes, hasn't gotten consideration by the Republicans in the Judiciary committee.
Pryor neglected to mention the hatchet job Schumer had done on Holmes.
There is nobody else in this world I would rather get into the ring with, no time limit, no holds barred....
I'm not in the Senate, I believe in fighting fire with fire. Fighting to win does not mean fighting dirty.
I thought you might llike this photo.
RUN RUDI, RUN!!!!
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