MEATHEAD EDITORIAL
Posted on 03/05/2005 7:01:29 PM PST by neverdem
The White House's insistence on choosing only far-right judicial nominees has already damaged the federal courts. Now it threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress. The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. Republicans and Democrats should tone down their rhetoric, then sit down and negotiate.
President Bush likes to complain about the divisive atmosphere in Washington. But he has contributed to it mightily by choosing federal judges from the far right of the ideological spectrum. He started his second term with a particularly aggressive move: resubmitting seven nominees whom the Democrats blocked last year by filibuster.
The Senate has confirmed the vast majority of President Bush's choices. But Democrats have rightly balked at a handful. One of the seven renominated judges is William Myers, a former lobbyist for the mining and ranching industries who demonstrated at his hearing last week that he is an antienvironmental extremist who lacks the evenhandedness necessary to be a federal judge. Another is Janice Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as "our socialist revolution."
To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. Republican leaders now claim that judicial nominees are entitled to an up-or-down vote. This is rank hypocrisy. When the tables were turned, Republicans filibustered President Bill Clinton's choice for surgeon general, forcing him to choose another. And Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, who now finds judicial filibusters so offensive, himself joined one against Richard Paez, a Clinton appeals court nominee.
Yet these very same Republicans are threatening to have Vice President Dick Cheney rule from the chair that a simple majority can confirm a judicial nominee rather than the 60 votes necessary to stop a filibuster. This is known as the "nuclear option" because in all likelihood it would blow up the Senate's operations. The Senate does much of its work by unanimous consent, which keeps things moving along and prevents ordinary day-to-day business from drowning in procedural votes. But if Republicans change the filibuster rules, Democrats could respond by ignoring the tradition of unanimous consent and making it difficult if not impossible to get anything done. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has warned that "the Senate will be in turmoil and the Judiciary Committee will be hell."
Despite his party's Senate majority, however, Mr. Frist may not have the votes to go nuclear. A sizable number of Republicans - including John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee and John Warner - could break away. For them, the value of confirming a few extreme nominees may be outweighed by the lasting damage to the Senate. Besides, majorities are temporary, and they may want to filibuster one day.
There is one way to avert a showdown. The White House should meet with Senate leaders of both parties and come up with a list of nominees who will not be filibustered. This means that Mr. Bush - like Presidents Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush before him - would agree to submit nominees from the broad mainstream of legal thought, with a commitment to judging cases, not promoting a political agenda.
The Bush administration likes to call itself "conservative," but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.
"presenting them with multiple challenges"
ROTFLOL! And .. as usual they have misunderestimated him again.
But .. the filibuster is allowed for legislation - just not judicial nominees.
I don't want to get rid of the filibuster - I just want it to comply with the Constitution - not subvert it.
"they know nothing about our Supreme Law"
Don't kid yourself. They have an agenda - and they will try to deceive to support and promote that agenda.
If this is in the Editorial Section, then the NY Times is not breaching any duty of honor. The fact that it's clearly labeled as opinion makes it a legitimate, if not particularly persuasive, argument. It's editorializing in the regular news sections that irks me.
Let the Times say whatever it wants to its readers. It's all an echo chamber anyway. It's no longer the days when newspapers can control the agenda (recall the great scene in Citizen Kane when his wife asks him: "What will people think?"; to which Kane replies "What I tell them to think!"). The NY TImes as created by Adolph Ochs is dead. WR Hearst has won from the grave, with a return of yellow partisan journalism.
The NY Times is the mummy of Lenin for Journalism--an attempt to preserve an icon of their past, an endeavor to elevate an idea into a Belief, an effort to bluff their way into greatness; but everyone can see that the thing is dead and is held together with spit and make-up.
Here's some interesting information about those Clinton nominees:
Paez (who got his vote and was confirmed) :
http://slate.msn.com/id/1004818/
and Foster, the nominee for Surgeon General who had performed abortions, done studies on an abortion drug and who reportedly had sterilized mentally retarded women:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/02/24/back.time/
Why is it that 1 demorat can complain and the lefties in the Senate will jump, but millions of Republican's complain and the republican senate still runs scared? Come on guy's just do it! Or we will find someone that will.
You can't do that. What you're calling the "Gentleman's Filibuster" is written into the current rules. The whole point, if I understand it correctly, is that cloture doesn't happen automatically anymore when actual/literal debate ends. But then I don't know much of Senate procedure myself, so hopefully I will be corrected, but I assume the best the Republicans could do -- short of the "nuclear" option or something like it -- is to "simulate" a "real" filibuster by refusing to close or open debate on any other issue, or some defined range of issues, until the nominees are addressed. The drawback here is that bills the Bush admin wants would be delayed, and that the Dems would get even more effective obstruction for which the Republicans might end up taking the blame.
When the history of the Slimes is finally written, crap such as this will be cited as one of the reasons for the downfall.
Utterly shameless and a sorry excuse for what passes as journalism.
The filibuster is not an honored tradition, although it may be a long tradition.
Simple question: if the filibuster is "so honored" is there anything that the CURRENT rules prevent senators from filibustering?
I think there is. I think they're prevented by rule from filibustering appropriations bills.
Why that?
Gee, I looked for Harry Reid's signature on the article but I haven't found it - at least not yet. Stupid NYT - if it were the other way around there would be an impassioned plea for majority representation - "why should 51 be less than 41?"
There is a part of me that supports the "nuclear option," and a part of me that does not. Don't get me wrong, I love a good political fight, but I hesitate to take that next step out of concern over what could happen to our side when some day in the future we're back in the minority. I suggest Bill Frist and Harry Reid meet, go over the current list of nominees, and try to fashion some sort of compromise. But, in the end, if Reid, Schumer, et. al. refuse to negotiate in good faith, and continue to filibuster and lambaste all 7 nominees as "far right extremists," then yes, I would support the "nuclear option."
Now, the Old Grey Whore (NYTimes) wants to take the vote from the Senate, too.
What evil resides in New York and (its slave-state owned-by-Judicial marriage) Massachusetts)
oyez. ;-)
To the New York Times:
All your judges are belong to us.
and
Most of your Senate are belong to us.
BTTT
WTF?
MEATHEAD EDITORIAL
Man! They start their LYING in the very first freakin' paragraph!The White House's insistence on choosing only far-right judicial nominees has already damaged the federal courts. Now it threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress. The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House's judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history. Republicans and Democrats should tone down their rhetoric, then sit down and negotiate.
They are RIGHTFULLY CLAIMING so, too, you fools!
Check THIS out. A recent speech by John Cornyn (R-Texas):
(Texas Senator John Cornyn's)
Floor Speech: Judicial NominationsExcerpt:
So my question is, to whom is the distinguished Democratic leader [Harry Reid] referring? None of President Bush's nominees have been turned down by the Senate-- none, zero. The nominees he referred to were denied a vote altogether. In fact, all of these nominees would have been confirmed last Congress had majorities been allowed to govern as they have during the entire history of this country and the entire history of the Senate -- save and except for the time when Democrats chose to deny a majority the opportunity for an up-or-down vote.
So I would say, correcting the record, it is a little difficult to turn down a nominee, as the minority leader has said, if the nominee never gets an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.
Now, the second part I would like to correct is that when the Democratic leader was asked whether obstruction would create a 60-vote threshold for all future judicial nominees, he said:
It's always been a 60-vote for judges. There is -- nothing change[d].
He said:
Go back many, many, many years. Go back decades and it's always been that way.
Well, we took his advice, and we did go back over the years.
It turns out it has not always been that way. Indeed, there has never, ever, ever been a refusal to permit an up-or-down vote with a bipartisan majority standing ready to confirm judges in the history of the Senate until these last 2 years. Many nominees have, in fact, been confirmed by a vote of less than 60 Senators.
In fact, the Senate has consistently confirmed judges who enjoyed a majority but not 60-vote support, including Clinton appointees Richard Paez, William Fletcher, and Susan Oki Mollway; and Carter appointees Abner Mikva and L.T. Senter.
Click HERE for the full article.
It would be fun to read the 1975 NYT editorials when the Democrats changed the Senate rules to stop filibusters from 67 votes to 60 votes.
Democrats did that to get around a determined Republican minority.
I wonder if the NYT were as upset with the whole deal or perhaps they were all for it. I'd bet on the latter.
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