“The vice president stepped into the filibuster fray on Friday and threw his weight behind the nuclear option,” but Harry Reid shot over Dick’s head and let Bush have it in a statement titled, “BUSH GOES BACK ON WORD AND ENCOURAGES IRRESPONSIBLE ABUSE OF POWER.” See also: Rallies Nationwide Wednesday … More below:
From Salon’s War Room:
“There is no justification for allowing the blocking of nominees who are well qualified and broadly supported,” Cheney told the Republican National Lawyers Association. “These nominations were held up strictly for partisan political reasons, in an astounding departure from historical precedent.”
“Let me emphasize, the decision about how to proceed will be made by the Republican leadership in the Senate,” he added. “But if the Senate majority decides to move forward and if the issue is presented to me in my elected office as president of the Senate and presiding officer, I will support bringing those nominations to the floor for an up or down vote.”
In a rapidly issued, biting rebuttal, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, went straight to the top, ripping into President Bush.
“In the span of three minutes, the vice president managed to reinvent 200 years of Senate history and ignore the fact that Congress has already approved 205 of this administration’s nominees. Apparently, a 95 percent confirmation rate is not enough for this president. He wants it all, even if it means shattering the checks and balances in our government in order to put radical judges on the bench.
“Last week, I met with the president and was encouraged when he told me he would not become involved in Republican efforts to break the Senate rules. Now, it appears he was not being honest, and that the White House is encouraging this raw abuse of power.
“It is disturbing that Republicans have so little respect for the separation of powers established by our founding fathers. Based on his comments last week, I had hoped that the president was prepared to join Democrats in taking up the work of the American people, but it is clear this is no longer the case. If the White House and Congress insists on proceeding down this road, Democrats will do all we can to ensure that Congress pursues an agenda the American people can be proud of.”
If that’s a not-so-cryptic way of signaling all-out partisan warfare and congressional deadlock to come, we should all be beaming indeed.
Tonight, ‘Hardball” is previewing “Justice Sunday.” It’s on at 4PM PDT.
Senator Salazar (D-CO) blasted Focus on the Family today. Here’s a good article with the run-down. He managed to get one of their board of directors to admit that he thinks the Roman Catholic Church is a false church. Let’s see how that plays out in the pews. Is the fundie/conservative Catholic unity fracturing?
Looks like Harry’s workin’ out okay. Keep going with the jabs and body blows, Senator, the uppercut will present itself soon enough.
Let me repost for anyone who missed it, a synopsis of the two judges that Bush renominated and the Republican majority on the Senate Committee sent to the floor:
Priscilla Owen– Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
President Bush first nominated Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen during the 107th Congress. She received a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which eventually declined her nomination. In early January 2003, a coalition of civil rights groups wrote a letter to President Bush, urging him not to renominate Justice Owen, in part because her opinions “reveal a troubling hostility to discrimination and employee rights.” (Texas Ad Hoc Coalition on Judicial Nominees)
Another observer noted that “her judicial record suggests strongly that she lacks a commitment to equal access to justice for all.” (Alliance for Justice) One civil rights group cited a case in which her narrow interpretation of a statute permitted age discrimination, despite the fact that the majority of the Texas Supreme Court found the statute “unambiguous” in banning age discrimination. Commentators note that, even on the conservative Texas Supreme Court, Owen is far to the right of mainstream.
Here is the kicker: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a former Texas state supreme court associate, once described Owen’s attempt to legislate from the bench in a case involving reproductive rights as “an unconscionable act of judicial activism.” Now folks that is a hoot!
Nearly 40 organizations, including the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Women’s Law Center, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Employment Lawyers Association, oppose Owen’s nomination.
Janice Rogers Brown for D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Despite opposition from nearly 80 national organizations and more than 200 law professors and legal academicians, President Bush nominated Janice Rogers Brown for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in July 2003. As a judge on the California Supreme Court, Brown consistently demonstrated hostility to affirmative action, civil rights, and the rights of disabled individuals, workers, prisoners, and women, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
In an affirmative action case in California, a fellow Republican-appointed justice, despite concurring with the result of the case, described her view as “a serious distortion of history.” In that case, not only did Brown issue a lengthy opinion opposing affirmative action programs, but she also strongly condemned Supreme Court decisions that had upheld such programs in the public sector, even in limited circumstances. Several of Brown’s statements disclosed during her confirmation hearing led one former supporter, Stephen Barnett, a University of California law professor emeritus, to rescind his support. Brown was criticized for engaging in “government-bashing” and presenting “extreme and outdated ideological positions” that are “outside the mainstream of today’s constitutional law.” In one speech, criticizing government programs, she stated that the federal government is “the opiate of the masses [and a drug for] multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.”
So, this is leaving me really puzzled. Gonzales refers to Owen as a “judicial activist” and everybody and their mother cites Brown for “government bashing”, but these are the plums that Bush has his thumb stuck in?
Thanks for that polydactyl, I have copied it to my notes and will bring it out the next time I have a discussion with a Rep. about judicial nominees.
Perhaps we should just call this another judge in the pocket of the administration and they want to put this person to use (for what purpose????), sitting right next to the nominee to the UN, Bolton.
Did anyone see this LATimes story?
WASHINGTON — Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.
An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to take a black robe off the bench,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, according to an audiotape of a March 17 session. The tape was provided to The Times by the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
DeLay has spoken generally about one of the ideas the leaders discussed in greater detail: using legislative tactics to withhold money from courts.
“We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse,” DeLay said at an April 13 question-and-answer session with reporters.
The leaders present at the March conference, including Perkins and James C. Dobson, founder of the influential group Focus on the Family, have been working with Frist to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations …
From Media Matters:
Focus on the Family founder and chairman James C. Dobson made a series of false and misleading claims about the Senate’s use of the filibuster to block judicial nominees. On the April 21 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Dobson asserted: 1) that former Clinton nominee Richard A. Paez “was not an appeals court judge” and would not “have had a majority if given a simple up-or-down vote”; 2) that former President Bill Clinton “got 100 percent” of his appellate court nominees who reached the floor approved; and 3) that the “ABA [American Bar Association] had given its highest stamp of approval” to the 10 Bush nominees filibustered by Senate Democrats.
First, Clinton did indeed nominate Paez for an appellate court seat; he was finally confirmed in March 2000 after four years of delay by the Republican-controlled Senate. Second, Republican senators blocked 16 of Clinton’s appellate court nominees in his second term alone. Finally, only three of the 10 Bush nominees that Democrats have filibustered have received the ABA’s highest rating.
Responding to co-host Alan Colmes’s suggestion that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is being “disingenuous” by “acting as if the filibuster’s a terrible thing” after Frist himself had voted to filibuster Paez’s nomination, Dobson replied: “That was not an appeals court judge. And it was not a situation where the judge would have had a majority if given a simple up-or-down vote.” But Paez was an appeals court nominee, and he was ultimately approved in an up-or-down vote. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 13, 2003: “As recently as March 2000, several Republicans voted to filibuster two Californians whom President Clinton had named to the 9th Circuit appellate court: Richard A. Paez and Marsha L. Berzon. … Ultimately, the Republican stalling tactics failed, and both jurists now sit on the appellate court.”
Dobson then purported to “quote the statistics” to Colmes on the ratio of appellate nominees approved during the Clinton and Bush administrations: “President Bush has only gotten 67 percent of his appeals court nominees through when they got to the floor of the Senate. Bill Clinton got 100 percent.” But Dobson’s statistic is highly misleading; in fact, the Republican-led Senate kept 16 of Clinton’s second-term appellate court nominees “off the floor,” in most cases denying them even committee hearings.
Finally, in response to Colmes, who said of Democratic filibusters that “we’re talking about 10 [nominees] out of 205 who have been confirmed,” Dobson countered that those 10 nominees had received the ABA’s “highest stamp of approval.” But of the 10 Bush nominees filibustered by Senate Democrats, only three — Miguel Estrada, David McKeague, and Priscilla Owen — have received a unanimous “Well Qualified” rating from the ABA (ratings for all nominees are listed during the 108th Congress and the 109th Congress), and McKeague initially received a split rating of “Well Qualified” and “Qualified” during the 108th Congress before receiving an unanimous “Well Qualified” rating during the 109th Congress. Of the remaining seven filibustered nominees, four received a split rating of “Well Qualified” and “Qualified,” and three received a split rating of “Qualified” and “Not Qualified.”