Seven Republican Dwarves Sell-Out Snow White and Surrender the Key to the Castle     5/31/2005
By Jan LaRue, Chief Counsel

An extraordinarily bad deal leaves Democrats with ability to filibuster judicial nominees.

Commentary

On the eve of a Senate showdown to end filibustering of judicial nominees, so that every nominee would get an up-or-down vote, seven of his own cut off Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) at the knees by cutting a back-room deal with Democrats.

The seven soft-centered Republicans, who relish the “centrist” title, are John McCain (Arizona), John Warner (Virginia), Mike DeWine (Ohio), Lindsay Graham (South Carolina), Susan Collins (Maine), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Lincoln Chaffee (Rhode Island). They cut a nutty deal with seven Democrats, leaving Frist short of the votes he needed. It’s a deal Chamberlain would have fallen for and Churchill would have torched with his cigar.

Frist announced Monday that he had scheduled a cloture vote for noon today on Priscilla Owen, the President’s nominee to the Fifth Circuit, who’s been waiting for a floor vote for more than four years. If the cloture vote failed, Frist planned to employ “the constitutional option”—a parliamentary ruling from the Senate president, Vice President Dick Cheney, that only 51 votes are necessary to confirm a nominee. Cheney had announced that he would issue that ruling and cast a tie vote if necessary to confirm Owen. That would have stopped future filibusters of judges at 51 votes unless and until a majority of the Senate changed it.

Democrats who signed are Robert Byrd (West Virginia), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Ken Salazar (Colorado), Mark Pryor (Arkansas), Joe Lieberman (Connecticut), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana) and Daniel Inouye (Hawaii).

Instead of ending the unconstitutional use of filibusters so that every current and future nominee gets an up-or-down vote, the seven dwarves have left the filibuster key to the Supreme Court Castle to the Democrats, in exchange for a cloture vote on three nominees. It’s the key they have wanted above all else. They're willing to vote for cloture on the three nominees they've objected to most, Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and Bill Pryor, knowing that they will be confirmed, in order to keep the filibuster to use on all future nominees, including the Supreme Court.

It should be abundantly clear to any apologist for the Democrats that their opposition to Owen, Brown and Pryor was a duplicitous and despicable sham. It should also be crystal clear that the seven Republican dealmakers are among the most naive people on the planet if they think they’ve boxed the Democrats in on the filibuster.

The deal says, “Nominees should only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances, and each signatory must use his or her own discretion and judgment in determining whether such circumstances exist.” I wouldn’t let any of the Republicans who signed this negotiate a used-car deal for me. Does anyone want to ask these seven Republicans why they think so little of their President that he would nominate somebody so extraordinarily bad that would justify a filibuster?

Republicans claim that after the Democrats allow confirmation of Owen and Janice Rogers Brown to the D.C. Circuit and Bill Pryor to the 11th Circuit, Democrats won’t be able to call a nominee “extraordinary” and get away with a filibuster. Republicans will say, “But they’re just like the ones you allowed to be confirmed.”

Does the name Charles Pickering ring a bell? Democrats unanimously confirmed him to the district court and then filibustered this good man as a racist when he was nominated to the Fifth Circuit. It’s not hard for them to concoct “extraordinary circumstances” because words mean whatever they want them to mean.

Sen. Frist said the compromise is “short on principle” because every nominee deserves an up-or-down vote. And the seven dwarves had all said the same thing and then went for the short stuff.

Watching last night’s press conference was like watching parallel universes. Seven giddy, proud Republican Chamberlains telling us their deal is based on mutual respect and trust while they bring out their hero, Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia), who has compared the President to Nazis. At the same time, Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and company, who’ve called the nominees extremists, kooks and Neanderthals, were attacking the President and Vice President and bragging about saving the “integrity of the Supreme Court from undue influence of the radical right-wing.”

Both sides talked about saving the Senate and the Republic, as if they thwarted an attack from a terrorist plane headed for the Capitol. Thank God that’s still in the hands of our great fighter pilots.

It wasn’t about preserving the integrity of the Senate or saving the Republic. It’s about preserving the filibuster, which has devolved into a ridiculous joke. The filibuster didn’t come into existence until 1806 and wasn’t used until 1837 to block legislation. It was never used on a judicial nominee until 2003 by Democrats.

The filibuster was originally intended to save a senator from the embarrassment of being cut off in the middle of a speech. Instead, senators have been allowed to stand for hours and read from cookbooks and phone books in order to thwart the will of the majority who want to vote on legislation. Now and in the future it will be used to keep judicial nominees from confirmation by a simple majority vote, which has been the rule since the founding of the Republic.

The American people won’t take this lying down, and neither will Concerned Women for America.

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