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.
No, my "whatever" evidences a complate lack of interest in what the NYT's has to contribute to the discussion.
And we're not talking about eliminating filibusters all together...
They only want judges who they consider liberal enough to support their agenda.If the president has to go nuclear to get his judges voted on then he should go ahead and drop the bomb on the heads of the moronic democrats.I don't know where the writer has been for the last four years but the democrats have attempted to sabotage everything this president has pushed forward.They act like spoiled rotten brats who can't get over being a party of losers.
And what the Republicans simply want is for these judicial nominees to get out of committee, where they can get a vote. The NYT seems to forget that we can't get a 51 majority vote unless that happens first OR the pubbies invoke the nuclear option.
"Senator Byrd is a former Klansman. In fact, he was the official “Kleagle” (one who recruits new members for the cause) of West Virginia. He is said to have “retired” from the group in 1943, but speeches in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated his allegiance to the hooded few. This gem of a statement from the 1964 filibuster of the Civil Rights Act (yes, Byrd was the other leader) shows his true colors, “[I would never fight] with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times…than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."
The WormTongue Times.
The NY Slimes' ilk is out of the White House, out of the Senate majority, out of the House majority, and hopefully soon out of the Judicial majority. It is difficult to accept being a loser.
The Slimes has hired Richard Clark as a columnist. That should tell us all we need to know about "All the Propaganda That's Fit to Print".
This kind of BS editorial plays with words that ignore the fact that the liberal democrats lost votes in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. With those losses the dems still feel that they are in charge, while the pubbies are too damned afraid to take control. It's probably a good thing that I am not the sen maj leader because I would use the nuke option in a heartbeat. I would have done it so fast that it would have made Olympia Snowe's private parts tingle and would have reinitiated all of the pain that Mr McCain suffered when all of the bones in his body were previously broken.
BINGO
It's up there with Search Light Harry calling Greenspan a Political Hack
I smell D E S P E R A T I O N from the Dems/Libs
We hear lots about "ultraconservatives," "extreme conservatives," "far right" nominees, etc... When is the last time someone was labelled "ultra liberal," "extreme leftist," etc... by the MSM?
The New Deal *was* a socialist revolution. It is a sad day when a simple statement of fact puts one out of polite society.
Do you think he has 51? I'm almost sure he doesn't.
Do you think he has 50?
If he only has 48-49 sure votes, he'd better be damned careful about pulling the trigger-because ths is a vote he cannot stand to lose.
I had never heard the term "neo-con" before 2000. Can't make it through the day without hearing it now.
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