‘It could be the first judge fight we’ve had in quite a while’

June 4, 2007

For a while, partisan fights over Bush’s most far-right judicial nominees were some of the most intense on Capitol Hill. Remember the nuclear option? Of course, the “Gang of 14” diffused tensions, handed the White House a sweet deal, a series of ideologues won Senate confirmation, and the issue faded away.

We don’t hear much about it, but the process has been running quite smoothly lately. Even with a Democratic Senate, a series of judicial nominations have moved forward the past couple of months, with nary a word of opposition.

But the relative comity may not last much longer.

After six months of steadily approving President Bush’s top-tier judicial nominations, Senators this week may be headed for their first partisan battle over the bench this Congress when the Judiciary Committee votes to install Leslie Southwick to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Southwick is highly regarded in GOP circles, but his record on civil and human rights issues has raised concerns recently among some Democrats and left-leaning organizations who view him as too incendiary for a lifetime appellate court spot.

And while that unease may not be enough to sink Southwick’s Senate confirmation entirely, it may be just enough to spark some attention-getting fireworks when the Judiciary panel considers his appointment on Thursday.

“This nomination is a controversial one,” said a senior Democratic Senate aide. “I’m not 100 percent certain he has the votes to make it out of the committee, and if he does go to the floor, this could be the first showdown in 2007 over a controversial Bush nominee.”

“It could be the first judge fight we’ve had in quite a while,” echoed a senior GOP Senate aide.

As a rule, payback is a petty, mean-spirited concept. But in this case, context matters, at least a little.

In the last two years of Clinton’s second term, a Republican-led Senate (led by Orrin Hatch) effectively ended the judicial confirmation process. Completely. Whether a judicial nominee was considered controversial was irrelevant. Whether there were important vacancies was irrelevant. Whether the justice system was affected was irrelevant.

The strategy was hardly a secret — Hatch & Co. wanted to run out the clock on Clinton’s presidency, so they stopped holding hearings for his judicial nominees. Hatch figured he had nothing to lose — if a Republican won in 2000, the GOP could help stack the judiciary again. If Gore won, he’d pick up where Clinton left off, but at least there’d be a two-year delay.

Since taking back the majority last November, Dems have been far more responsible. Several Bush nominees, including federal appeals’ court nominees, not only have been approved by committee, but have received unanimous support on the Senate floor.

If they consider Southwick controversial, they’d be fully justified in giving the GOP a little of their own medicine.

And is Southwick worth fighting over? Here’s a helpful synopsis (.pdf) of his record, which is about what you’d expect given this White House.

We’ll see how far this goes, but there’s no reason for Senate Dems to back down from this kind of fight.

We’ll see how far this goes, but there’s no reason for Senate Dems to back down from this kind of fight.

And every reason not to back down from this fight. If they don’t give a little of the Hatch & co. medicine to the GOP then the GOP will rightfully view the Dems as weak and will see no reason to change their behavior if they ever do get into power. I think the Dems should loudly proclaim they are going to treat the W administration the same way the GOP treated Clinton in this regard.

  • Giving the thugs a dose of their own medicine is a good idea. No more hearings for judges for the next 18 months and 16 days. Particularly no hearings on a Supreme Court nominee.

  • Ummm….seems to me there should still be a pretty stiff “judge fight” going on, in the person of the egregious Alberto Gonzales. I don’t mean to change the subject, but I haven’t heard a peep out of that issue lately. Is it just going to blow over, and that pathological liar get to keep his job? He’s still pulling down a pretty hefty paycheck while nothing is happening.

  • Edo and Tom, I agree. But I ain’t gettin’ my hopes up. Based upon all available evidence, the Dems will roll over faster than Margaret Carlson at Fred Thompson’s post-announcement party.

  • Once again, the Dems play by the rules and are burned for it. Hatch holds up all of those nominees for two years, and then the vacancies are filled with Bush’s selections, who the Dems simply let sail through. Maybe it’s time to get tough, and do the same thing back. No nominees. None at al all.

  • I don’t see any reason to approve one more Bush judicial nominee, not when it is pretty clear that this president does not understand the function of the judicial system, and not as long as he regards that system as functioning to serve the needs of those in power and not the needs of the people – all of the people.

    And I sincerely hope that the Democrats will consider that the ultimate in fairness may come not from allowing this president to get hearings for his nominees, but from protecting the people from the consequences of Bush nominees being confirmed.

    Am beginning to think that the nominees are all members of the “He-Man, Woman-Haters” Club.

  • In the last two years of Clinton’s second term, a Republican-led Senate (led by Orrin Hatch) effectively ended the judicial confirmation process.

    How many people were confirmed during the last two years of the Clinton Administration?

  • After caving on Iraq, this would be a good time to give some push-back to remind the Deciderer that the opposition is real. But I’m not in favor of blocking all nominees, just the crappy ones. We are the party that wants government to be successful, after all.

  • short fuse,

    But I’m not in favor of blocking all nominees, just the crappy ones.

    On what do you base the notion that the W administration would nominate anything other than those type of nominees? I can think of no basis for asserting such a possibility.

  • Fair point Edo. I guess I was thinking about not blocking people whose professional qualifications were solid and whose ideology was not lunatic fringe. This isn’t a perfect example, but when Roberts was being confirmed for the Supreme Court, no one (to my knowledge) argued that he wasn’t professionally qualified for the job. And while he’s certainly far more conservative than I’d like, it was difficult to demonstrate that he was inclined to twist the law to meet his politics.

    To be honest, I haven’t done any looking into the backgrounds of any recent nominees, so I was jumping to a conclusion that they might have actually been qualified. You’re probably right that one should assume the opposite with this administration.

    I am open to the argument that we’re going to block all nominees until Gonzalez resigns/is fired/is impeached.

  • Anything and everyone coming from this administration should be un-done and definitely the Dems should not continue to approve more of this administration’s ilk. What the hell is wrong with these people? Have they so quickly forgotten the recent ambassador appointment by ambush. When will they quit being so cooperative with these GOP cheats? The Dems need to learn to block, stall, impede, and “gum to death” everything coming from the Repubs. till we can get them out of office. Nothing good comes from these guys…ever, in this administration.. Put it off till ’08 when there will be a Democratic president and you can appoint your own judges and not GOP lackeys.
    The Goodling effect must stop now.

  • For all the savvy and intelligence it must take for them to get to where they are, sometimes our Democratic members of Congress seem like uber-crackheads. If they don’t try to change/update the rules somehow so the Republicans can’t keep doing what they did to Clinton, or they don’t do the same thing to try to deter the behavior and keep us at something like the status quo, that what will happen? What’s to keep the Republicans from doing the same thing again and again, every time we have a Democratic president, until we only have conservative judicial nominees who pass? After all, the Republicans will tell each other that they’re only doing what’s within the rules. Then the U.S. will be on a set of rails to a sort of conservative social revolution, through how much judge-made law and judicial decisions will eventually come out of those nominees. Only guys like Richardson and Gravel stand in the way of the U.S. being what it is now, and becoming something far different than it is. One hopes one of them would get a clue, and figure out something to propose instead of waiting for Kerry/Clinton/Obama/the nonprofit orgs/the Carpetbagger Report, etc., to propose something.

  • that what will happen?

    Oops, should have read, then what will happen? as in, if the Dems don’t change the confirmation process somehow or don’t stall Republican nominees and the Republicans continue to stall Dem nominees- then what will happen?

    A lot of, uh, better people than me are apparently expecting the problem to right itself, since this is such a gosh-darn wonderful world we live in.

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