Rick Santorum, a Virginia-based bi-weekly contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer (earning $1750/per), has some advice for his dwindling array of former colleagues:
Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania told a Republican lawyers group Friday their party should take the filibuster off the table as an option against President Obama's judicial nominations.
"The word filibuster should not come out of the lips of Republican senators," Santorum told a gathering of the Republican National Lawyers Association in Washington. He said "any idea of a filibuster is folly" given the slim chances of success.
"You don't pull out a gun if everybody in the room knows it's not loaded," Santorum said.
But Santorum said many in the Republican caucus would be turned off by a filibuster and a failed one would make the GOP look all the more marginalized.
Santorum said it would be a challenge to even convince GOP senators to make judicial nominations a priority. "This is going to be hard to do," Santorum said, given all the other high-profile Democratic initiatives they're fighting against.
There are, at present, 69 vacant slots in the federal judiciary, 23 of which are categorized as judicial emergencies (including 11 on the Courts of Appeals) because of caseload needs combined with the duration of the vacancy.
Let's fill these slots swiftly with capable men and women dedicated to the values embedded in our Constitution -- protecting individual rights and liberties, genuine equality, access to justice, democracy and the rule of law. How about some judges in the mold of Marshall and Brennan again?