Monday, May 12, 2008
In a surprising reversal of fortune, before relinquishing control of the Senate, Republicans force a vote on the controversial solicitor general -- and win.
May 25, 2001 | As the clock on solicitor general nominee Ted Olson wound down, Republicans took a bold final shot, and Democrats, perhaps already satisfied knowing that they would soon be the new majority party in the Senate, made only a token effort to block it, and Olson won by a 51-47 vote.
While it might have looked like the Democrats were firmly opposed to Olson's nomination, the party, according a senior Democratic staffer close to the proceedings, could not recruit the requisite number of 41 to support a filibuster to hold up the Olson nomination. So when the roll call finally came, only two Democrats (Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., and Sen. Ben Nelson, D- Neb.) voted for Olson, but the other 47 who voted against him already knew he was a sure thing.
Olson's success was a remarkable reversal of fortune. When word spread earlier in the week that Sen. Jim Jeffords, R-Vt., would be abandoning the GOP to become an independent, it slowly became clear that the Democrats would win control of the Senate, and Olson's chances began to look grim. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., predicted Wednesday that, under Democratic Senate rule, "Ted Olson will be practicing law, making a lot of money" in the private sector.
By Thursday morning, Margaret Aitken, Biden's press secretary, tried to soften her boss's earlier statement. "I don't think it's really clear yet how it's going to shake out," she said. "I think it is too early to speculate about that."
Actually, it was already too late.
In less extraordinary times, Olson's nomination would already have been long dead. On May 18, the Senate Judiciary Committee split 9-9 over Olson, with Democrats still loudly questioning his answers under questioning about his ties to the Arkansas Project, the anti-Clinton scandal-hunt run through the American Spectator and funded by Richard Mellon Scaife during the mid-1990s. In ordinary times, a tie vote is a losing vote in the Senate. But the Republicans and Democrats in the evenly split Senate had agreed in December to allow Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., to break such deadlocks by filing a "discharge motion."
Lott did that last week, so Olson's nomination could've been moved to the floor any time after that. But committee Republicans, in deference to continued Democratic complaints and possibly in fear of a filibuster, allowed the minority members to continue probing Olson.
But when it became clear that the Democrats would assume control of the Senate, Lott set the Olson vote, frustrating opponents, including a prime target of the Arkansas Project. "It strikes me as a desperate measure," New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters, accusing the GOP of "try[ing] to jam this through while they still control the floor."
For Clinton, this nomination was personal. While Republicans publicly accused Democrats of opposing Olson purely for his role in successfully representing George W. Bush before the Supreme Court in the decision that effectively awarded Bush the presidency, they shied away from the virulent role the Spectator -- and Olson -- played during the 1990s as a critic of the Clintons. Olson himself, writing under a pseudonym, coauthored an outlandish article outlining the possible crimes that had been committed by President Clinton and Hillary Clinton and how stiff the penalties might be for those crimes. His wife, former federal prosecutor and conservative cable-TV pundit Barbara Olson wrote "Hell to Pay," the bible of anti-Hillary books among the far right, in which she described the former first lady as a woman "who has gone to the brink of criminality to amass wealth and power."
Clinton made an appearance before reporters to attack Olson, a man she said didn't "meet the standards that we should expect from somebody nominated for solicitor general."
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