from my blog, Basie!
It appears as though President Bush might have some trouble getting an ultra-conservative on to the Supreme Court even with a Republican Senate. Just ask Ted Olson.
Despite Republican gains, President Bush's picks for potential vacancies on the Supreme Court will face "political firestorm" in the Senate, the Bush administration's former chief lawyer at the high court said Thursday.
Theodore Olson, who resigned in July as solicitor general, predicted that Bush will get to name as many as three justices during his second term. Olson also said he expected that those choices will come under attack by interest groups and Senate Democrats who have already blocked 10 Bush nominees to other courts.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is seriously ill with thyroid cancer. Olson said that people are hopeful the 80-year-old recovers, but "even if he does, actuarial reality tells us there may be vacancies soon."
"Make no mistake about it, any attempted new appointment to the court, especially that of a chief justice, will set off a political firestorm," Olson, 64, told the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. "The presidential election was merely about the next four years. A Supreme Court justice is for life. It will not be pretty."
Even with the situation as it is, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is not even trying to win any friends from the other side of the aisle.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on Thursday urged Democrats to stop blocking President Bush's federal court nominees and hinted that he may try to change Senate rules to thwart their delaying tactics.
"One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end," Frist, R-Tenn., said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.
The Democrats' ability to stall White House picks for the federal bench was one of the most contentious issues of Bush's first term. Despite the GOP majority in the Senate, Democrats used the threat of a filibuster to block 10 of Bush's nominees to federal appeals courts. The Senate did confirm more than 200 of the president's choices. [emphasis added]
[...]
Frist previously has advocated changing Senate rules to make it more difficult to continue a filibuster. While the idea went nowhere in the current Congress, Frist raised it again in his speech, saying that judicial filibusters were "nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority."
"The Senate now faces a choice: Either we accept a new and destructive practice or we act to restore constitutional balance," he said.
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That sure sounds great, right? We can stop the gridlock if only the Democrats gave in. The only problem is that this issue is not nearly as simple as Frist makes it out to be. Kevin Drum explains:
How have things come to this pass in the self-styled greatest deliberative body in the world? Let's take a trip down memory lane.
When Democrats were in power and Republicans were in the minority, senatorial courtesy prevailed in judicial nominations. For decades, the rule was this: if both senators from a judge's home state objected to (or "blue slipped") a nominee, he was out. But when Republicans took control of the Senate during the Clinton presidency, these rules no longer looked so good to them:
- In 1998, for no special reason, Orrin Hatch decided that only one senator needed to object to a nomination. This made it easier for Republicans to obstruct Bill Clinton's nominees.
- In 2001, when one of their own became president, Hatch suddenly reversed course and decided that it should take two objections after all. That made it harder for Democrats to obstruct George Bush's nominees.
- In early 2003, Hatch went even further: senatorial objections were merely advisory, he said. Even if both senators objected to a nomination, it would still go to the floor for a vote.
- A few weeks later, yet another barrier was torn down: Hatch did away with a longtime rule that said at least one member of the minority had to agree in order to end discussion about a nomination and move it out of committee.
Nobody even pretended that these changes were guided by any kind of principle. Hatch was simply furious that Democrats dared to object to any of Bush's nominees, and he intended to put a stop to it even if he had to mow down every Senate rule in the process. It was at that point, with all the options they had granted to Republicans for years denied to them, that Democrats turned to the only one left: the filibuster.
The fact is that the GOP is attempting to destroy the Senate as the founders intended it: a deliberative body in which even
one member can stop the entire process if things are either too quickly or unfairly. This cannot be allowed, and I sincerely hope Frist does not have to go down in American history as the man who destroyed the Senate for momentary ideological gain.
check out my political blog, Basie!
