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You Heard It Here First
Were we right to think that the Republicans got the better of last month's deal on judicial filibusters? A Washington Post article suggests so:
Democrats generally cheered, and Republicans groused, when a bipartisan group of senators crafted a compromise on judicial nominations last month. But with the Senate now confirming several conservative nominees whom Democrats had blocked for years, some liberals are questioning the wisdom of the deal and fretting about what comes next.
"Our problem with the compromise is the price that was paid," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said yesterday. She and other Congressional Black Caucus members plan to march into the Senate today to protest the impending confirmation of Janice Rogers Brown.
Brown, as a black dissenter from liberal orthodoxy, is especially threatening to the CBC. More from the Post:
"It looks like in some ways [Majority Leader Bill] Frist is seizing the initiative," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. Moreover, he said, liberals may be deluded in thinking the bipartisan deal will thwart another contentious nominee--Brett M. Kavanaugh, the White House staff secretary--who is not named in the two-page agreement. Two years ago, Bush nominated Kavanaugh, who helped independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr pursue the Monica S. Lewinsky case, to the D.C. Circuit appeals court.
"I think it's wishful thinking by the Democrats that he won't move forward," Tobias said. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said of Kavanaugh in an interview yesterday, "I intend to push him."
The first stage of the compromise--the end of the filibusters of Priscilla Owen, Brown and William Pryor--is a political disaster for the Democrats. Not only are the three judges they condemned as "extremist" almost certain to be confirmed (Owen already has been), but the smear campaigns against them are being exposed as ridiculous.
The Democrats claimed that these three judges were so "extreme" that they couldn't even be allowed a vote. Well, OK, the seven Democrats who were party to the compromise agreed to abjure the filibuster in these cases in order to save it for others. But if the Democrats really believed their rhetoric, why did three of them vote for cloture (i.e., to end the filibuster) on Brown's nomination even though they were not obliged to do so? And why did 19 noncompromising Democrats vote to end the Owen filibuster?
Harry Reid, the Democrats' titular leader, comes across looking especially silly. He voted to end the Owen filibuster but not the Brown one. Maybe he thinks Brown is extreme and Owen isn't, or maybe he's motivated by race (a plausible suspicion given his history of inflammatory remarks about black jurists). But in any case his previous claims that all the filibustered nominees were "extreme" plainly do not reflect his actual views.
The lineup of the vote on the Brown filibuster bodes ill for Democratic hopes to resurrect the filibuster for other nominees in this Congress. Of the five red-state Democrats who are up for re-election next year, four voted in favor of cloture (compromisers Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska and noncompromisers Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Bill Nelson of Florida; Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico voted "no"). So did freshman Tom Carper of Delaware, also up for re-election.
Five Democrats are sufficient to end a filibuster, and given that some 10 Democrats are subject to the dual antifilibuster incentives of the agreement and the 2006 elections, it seems unlikely that the Dems will be able to re-create the party unity around the filibuster that they maintained in 2003-04.
