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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
If Republicans get away with changing the rules on judicial filibusters, decades of legal precedents are doomed. It's time for a preemptive strike.
Dec 23, 2004 | Right now, somewhere in the White House, administration strategists are hatching plans to go to war. Battle plans are being drawn. Timing and tactics are being finalized. A nuclear option is even being openly discussed.
The designated target? Iran? Syria? North Korea?
No, much closer to home: the U.S. Senate.
Salivating at the chance to radically remake the Supreme Court, the president and his loyal lapdogs in the world's most exclusive club are plotting to obliterate over 200 years of Senate tradition by eliminating the use of filibusters against judicial nominees.
The Robert's Rules of Disorder scheme would involve -- who else? -- Vice President Dick Cheney, in his role as presiding Senate officer, ruling that judicial filibusters are unconstitutional and Majority Leader Bill Frist squashing the Democrats' inevitable objection to such an edict by tabling the motion. As long as we're "spreading democracy" abroad, no reason to leave out the home front, right?
This is the so-called nuclear option, embraced with a wink and a nudge by Frist in November when he told the conservative Federalist Society: "One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end."
Invoking this parliamentary dirty trick would eliminate unlimited debate on judicial nominations and lower the number of votes needed before a nominee could be confirmed from the 60 necessary to break a filibuster to a simple majority of 51, and would drive a stake through the heart of the Senate's long-standing commitment -- indeed one of its founding purposes -- to defending the rights of the minority.
This scorched-earth approach is entirely in keeping with what Time magazine lauds this week as President Bush's "ten-gallon-hat leadership" style -- a my-way-or-the-highway approach rooted in arrogance and laced with an intolerance of dissent that has already delivered him a rubber-stamp Cabinet. Now he wants a rubber-stamp Senate.
Over the course of Bush's first term, 204 of his judicial nominees received Senate approval; just 10 were blocked. This is the highest number of lower-court confirmations any president has had in his first term since 1980, including President Reagan. But, apparently, the highest is not enough. This president wants total approval of his every wish. One small problem: That's not the way the Founding Fathers designed things. They had these funny notions about three separate but equal branches of government, free and open debate, and the value of checks and balances to ward off overreaching for power by those in the majority. They built an entire system of government to counteract the abuse that inevitably goes with overreaching.
Yet that is precisely what the plan to do away with judicial filibusters is: an out-and-out power grab by the president and his congressional accomplices. It's an underhanded scheme to kneecap the Constitution and take away the only weapon vanquished Democrats are left with to defend against Bush's "ten-gallon-hat" juggernaut.
