The GOP unabashedly used minority-filibuster votes to stop 2 advise-and-consent nominees of President Clinton.
Republicans Hatch, Trent Lott, and then majority leader Bob Dole joined the filibusters.
A lot less was at stake then than the balance of power for a generation.
View the senators' votes in the Roll Calls here >>
Fatal filibuster (GOP led) #1 - Henry FOSTER for Surgeon General and head of the US Public Health Service
Foster - was defeated by a minority-number of votes in 1995
Though 57 members voted to proceed to a vote
43 GOP senators nixed it. Here is the roll call.
Access the official roll call listing here.
Henry Foster was strongly anti-tobacco. He did not believe in forbidding abortion.
Because he held these views, a 43-person minority defeated the nomination.
He was blocked by 2 identical filibuster roll-calls.
After the 57/43-vote defeat, the position remained VACANT FOR 3 years.
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Fatal filibuster #2 - May 25, 1994 >>
Sam Brown was defeated for Ambassador rank position by filibuster in 1994. 51 Democrats + 5 Republicans favored shutting down debate to proceed to a vote.
56 members voted "yea" to close debate; the nomination was turned down when cloture was denied (56 -42) . Here is the roll call of the 42 "nays."
Access to the official roll call listing is found here.
Brown had supported antiwar protests in the Vietnam era.
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As for JUDICIAL nominees, Republicans made them regularly jump the 60-vote hoop.
This is not something that just happens once in 25 or 30 years or so.
DID appeals court nominees have to surmount a 60-vote hurdle?
ASK Stephen Breyer (now on the Supreme Court), when he was named by President Carter to be an appeals judge
on the 1st circuit in 1980.
BREYER had to overcome two cloture votes.
The first vote fell short. The second vote won over enough Republicans to show bipartisan support --> 68 -28.
Breyer was confirmed, 80-10, to the First circuit in 1980.
AGAIN And AGAIN, senators from the Republican side have opposed cloture and made appointees and judicial nominees garner far more than the 50-vote majority threshold.
Republicans and sometimes Democrats made judges jump thru the 60-vote hoop for cloture a bunch of times, for Marsha Berzon, Stephen Breyer, Richard Paez, Harvie Wilkinson, Lee Sarokin.
Judge Richard Paez, a Clinton appointee, had to pull more than 60 votes of acquiescence twice after he was stalled for 4 years.
Bill Frist voted TWICE to block him, for an "indefinite postponement" (Paez prevailed on that vote 67-31), and in a formal cloture vote (Paez won cloture 85-14). 4 years after being nominated, Paez was confirmed 59-39.
BILL FRIST voted against Cloture for Circuit court nominee Richard Paez --after his 4-year wait to reach the Floor of the Senate for a vote.
Paez prevailed in that cloture motion.
The Roll call record of the cloture vote can be found here:
Still, one more maneuver to oppose Paez was tried. A motion to further postpone was made the next day.
31 Republican members (including Frist, Lott, Grassley, Santorum, DeWine, Brownback, Kyl, Ashcroft) cast votes "To indefinitely postpone the nomination of Richard A. Paez."
while 67 members voted for the nomination to proceed (not a formal cloture vote). That vote record is found here.
That vote and the earlier vote to deny cloture failed because Paez had wider support:
59 members voted to confirm him, and he easily got far more than 60 votes to invoke cloture, 85 - 14,
Frist , Smith, DeWine, Inhofe, Brownback, etc. notwithstanding).
In the vote to confirm that followed, 14 Republicans joined 35 Democrats in approving Paezp; four years after the date he was first nominated.
[The roll-call of the vote to confirm is here.]
The lesson from the historical record of rollcalls- If a nominee can gain enough support and consensus, he will overcome the most determined opposition.
For a preceding appellate nominee, Marsha Berzon —
Allard, Brownback, Bunning, Craig, DeWine, Enzi, Gramm, Helms, Tim Hutchinson, Inhofe, Murkowski, Shelby, and Smith (but not Frist) again voted against cloture, but cloture was successfully invoked, 86-13, and Berzon won confirmation, 64 - 34.
[Record of the roll call vote for the nomination is here; for the cloture motion to proceed, here [March 8, 2000]
The Sarokin confirmation and cloture votes from 1994 can be accessed online.
So what does the record show? --> Senators regularly have made presidential nominees surmount the 60-vote hurdle.
The same single clause of the Constitution covers the approval of all nominations made by the President. It's Article 2, Section 2, clause 2. There is no constitutional distinction for judges, diplomats, cabinet.
How could members of the Judiciary Committee (lawyers all of them), its chairman, Orrin Hatch, then-majority leader Bob Dole (1995), future majority leader Lott, future Attorney General Ashcroft, Sen. Arlen Specter, whip Mitch McConnell have voted repeatedly to filibuster Presidential nominations in violation of the Consitution? How do they square it now?
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SO WHAT IS UNPRECEDENTED in the confirmation battles ?? -->
Just this. President George Bush Refuses to nominate a judge who can overcome the alarm threshold of the opposition party and win over a bipartisan consensus.
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US Constitution, Article 2, section2, clause2
and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States . . . .
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ADDENDUM - Know the math.
The Democrats do not have to show a full 41 votes to slow this train down. The burden is on Bill Frist to round up
60 affirmative "
YEA" votes to proceed to confirm a nominee.
The magic number is 60, not 41, Monday afternoon. Nearly all recent judicial nominees, for lower court and SCOTUS, gained this level of support, either for cloture or for the actual nomination.
It is rare for a court nominee to prevail with less than 60 "yeas." If some Democrats would rather abstain than vote no for cloture, then Frist has to pull together a bipartisan consensus for this nominee, as many prior appointees have needed in the past.
Here's an example. In '93, the motion to move to a vote for Clinton's nominee Assistant AG Walter Dellinger failed because it had 59 votes, not 60, even though there were only 39 (Republican) nay votes to deny cloture.
The Republican's successful filibuster of Dellinger held for 2 successive cloture votes.
The Dems needed to drum up more support for the nominee.
A week later Dellinger was confirmed with 65 ayes, and 34 nays because the Dems had to win over 10 GOP votes on top of their own 55 to confirm Dellinger.
The Republicans stopped filibustering Dellinger once they knew he had more than 60 votes to approve. (I don't think they called for a 3rd cloture vote, at least I don't see it in the roll call record.) They just did not object to moving to a vote once the Dems mustered more than 60 with a whip-count.
Links to the roll-call votes are in my May 2005 diary here, scroll-or-"edit-find" Dellinger for the detail.
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We should prevail on some of the less-than-fervent opponents of Alito (Salazar, Landrieu, ...) to vote "present" on cloture; then cloture would not succeed for awhile.
A delay of this nominee is warranted at least until we find out how the President's agencies were spying on ordinary non-terrorist citizens.
>> And the IRS last year started collecting party ID data on taxpayers?! The author of the book Bush's Brain (about Karl Rove) with the very foreign sounding name of James Moore landed on the no-fly list.
Are the IRS and the TSA keeping middle America safe from Bush's political enemies??
An outrage!! Hearings first. Who will check an unbridled presidency?
Vote no or "present," do not vote yes for cloture.