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Posted on 05/25/2005 12:01:41 PM PDT by JZelle
The arithmetic tells the story. The Democrats won the battle over who gets to shape the federal judiciary. In both tone and substance of their rhetoric, the Democrats believe they won, and who can argue with them? The Republican leadership is subdued, as befits a losers' locker room. The Republicans will pay dearly for the events of Monday night, when seven Democratic and seven Republican senators took over the leadership of the Senate, for a long time to come. Since the Republicans occupy the White House and command what ought to be a solid Senate majority of 55 members, this should have been no contest. But for the sixth and seventh Republican defections, the GOP would have had a rare, even historic, opportunity under the Constitution to nominate and approve, in up-or-down votes, highly qualified judges for the nation's highest courts. Because John McCain, John Warner, Lincoln Chafee, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Mike DeWine abandoned their leaders in the Senate and snubbed the president, that historic opportunity was lost. The deal immediately affects five "pending" appellate-court nominees. The agreement would allow floor votes to proceed for three: Priscilla Owen for the 5th Circuit, Janice Rogers Brown for the D.C. Circuit and William Pryor for the 11th Circuit. The deal immediately dooms the nominations of two others, William Myers III for the 9th Circuit and Henry Saad for the 6th Circuit, by permitting the seven Democratic senators to continue their party's filibusters against them. In addition to these five, Democrats had filibustered five other appellate-court nominees during the 108th Congress, three of whose names were subsequently withdrawn. Democrats threatened to filibuster half a dozen others.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
This article, is short sighted and incorrect.
Frist won a large prat of the political battle yesterday, and at the end of the day, Harry Reid had bent over, pulled down his pants grabbed a handful of vaseline, and relented before he got jammed.
Owen,Brown,Pryor = 3 youngest, most conservative of the nominees.
All will be placed at the Appellate level, and one will be on SCOTUS someday (probably Brown).
Without Firing the Shot.
Also consider Frist offerred 100 hours of debate on each nominee, which took up all of last week.
The Dems could have voted for Cloture, Confirmed Owen, and then launched into a tirade aobut how Frist was taking weeks over just three judges.
That didnt happen here.
200 Hours, two weeks of bad press alleviated,
advantage Frist.
3 Youngest (that means lngest serving) most Conservative nominees going onto the Fed Apellate Bench, without firing a shot...
advantage Frist.
5 left, with the dems promising only to filibuster the most extreme, well by their stated case, the most extreme were Owen,Brown,Pryor...therefore it is illegitimate to filibuster any of the others...
Advantage Frist.
If the Dems do filibuster the less extreme nominees, the (r)'s are free to vote the Nuke.
Advantage Frist.
Elevating Brown to SCOTUS, having been part of the MoU, makes the Dems unable to contest her.
Advantage Frist.
All Harry Reid got yesterday, was a little bit of face saving. No More. No Less.
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They are doing to us what we did to them in the early Clinton years. They have to band together or they die, just as the Republicans had to band together under Newt or die under Clinton.
Our hand-wringing is what the Dims did, with one exception.
All the GOP did was delay and water down national health care. The Dims then, as now, had absolute control over the judicial appointments.
While the procedural dynamic is the same, the substantive results are very different.
We need some Republican leadership with some backbone; when the worm turns, as it always does, we must filibuster EVERY dem judicial nominee.
RINO 7.
So it wouldn't bother you to see Reid as majority leader? Kennedy and Hillary as committee heads?
Oh come on, Pollyanna, stop denying the losses. This was a horrible deal when we could have had achieved an up or down vote for every nominee. We sold out when we had no need to. It was a completely idiotic thing to do, and was a win for the side that had nothing to offer in trade.
Yeah, it would bother me. That said, the current state of things aren't exactly the greatest. Every time it comes to Republican leaders to act like the party in charge, some twit steps up and starts kissing some Dim's boots. Quite frankly, I'm sick of it.
It would be nice to have Lee Atwater around.
It IS so.
How did we lose? Explain it to me.
Not to sound too much like a writer for Alias, but this was not the Endgame, but the BEGINNING of the Endgame PHASE..I still hold hope that there are moves on the board left, with the ultimate wildcards being the 2006 elections and the date of the Supreme Court vacancy. I still think its possible (and maybe its wishful thinking) that this is a strategery...something about Lindsey Graham, the more I think about it, is bothering me...as in..this is a setup and he is, for lack of a better term, double agent. Possibly a precursor to claiming the Dems broke a deal. It only takes two...Graham, Warner and Demint being the likely flips? I think we witnesses the beginning of a 1 year strategery..whether it works or not is another matter...ultimately they want to make the Dems look like obstructionists.
Okay, I've been watching too much Alias, and have the Season finale on my mind. Also wishful thinking.
I hope Lindsey Graham gets a true South Carolinian CONSERVATIVE to kick his butt in his next election...
The new alignment of the Senate in practice is 52 Democrats and 48 Republicans with several more Republicans likely to defect (ie. Smith of Oregon, etc.).
As Owen gets confirmed...
As Brown will get confirmed...
...
mmmhmmm.
All of the Bush judges get an up or down vote or the Republicans responsible must be the seven politicians targeted by defeat by conservatives more than any others.
I understand your frustration, and while I also felt it initially, I've morphed over to a wait-and-see attitude. It could be that this coalition was the face-saving move that left-leaning RINOs needed to be able to support the confirmation of some (obviously not all) judges that we've held dear in our hearts.
I can also envision a situation where Rat opposition to a judge (or SCOTUS nominee) can be held to be unreasonable, and that gives face-saving cover to a RINO to invoke the nuclear option. He/she can go back to blue state voters and say, "Well, I tried to come up with a way to avoid this, and the other side just wouldn't live up to the agreement." I have no doubt that the President has put a LOT of pressure on RINOs, as much as he can get away with. Using McCain's enormous ego as part of this might have just been a great sleight of hand on GWB's part.
Perhaps we've seen the ability of Rats to shame our RINOs into siding with them gone for the rest of this Congressional session. I'd be happy with that, until we improve our numbers in 2008. Then, the RINOs might not even be relevant, if they manage to get re-elected.
And in their first post-battle shaping, the Democrats confirmed Priscilla Owen to be a federal judge, ending years of fighting over her nomination.
You can always count on the stupid party to shoot itself in the foot.
Guess the next foot shooting by the stupid party will be to confirm Janice Brown....
Unfortunately 45-48 "real" Republicans could be about the correct number, but there are far fewer "real" conservatives among those "real" Republicans (knock off another 10 at the very least) so it will be a long, long time before 51 votes are available.
Yep. The SC will operate on 4-4 votes until Bush names his "Souter" or Hillary fills the vacancy.
Target acquisitions parameters set. Profile of target in view waiting for correct time to end the political life of the problem involved. This does not imply death just the political end of this person.
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