About a month ago, Senate Republicans threatened a “major meltdown” in the chamber unless Senate Dems approved more Bush judicial nominees. The showdown is poised to get even more heated.
Barring an unlikely confirmation of Leslie Southwick to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by the Judiciary Committee this week, Senate GOP leaders have privately mapped out a retaliatory plan that involves blocking passage of Democratic legislation from now until the August recess.
Republican Senators have been in discussions for weeks about how to get political mileage out of President Bush’s stalled judicial nominees, but sources say talks in recent days have honed in specifically on the possibility of shutting down Senate business if Southwick fails to make his way out of committee to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote this month. And with the clock ticking toward the August break, Republican leaders are growing increasingly impatient and ready to force the battle, GOP sources say.
“We can either prevent really bad legislation from passing or we can get a well-qualified judge,” offered one GOP leadership aide. “One of those two things will likely happen.”
This is only partially about the Southwick nomination. A senior GOP Senate aide conceded to Roll Call that engaging in a knock-down brawl with Dems over a conservative judicial nomination is “exactly the kind of issue that gets us to unite and it energizes our base, which is badly fractured in the aftermath of the immigration debate.”
This is all pretty ridiculous. First, if Senate Dems shut down the Senate every time the ousted GOP majority balked at a Clinton judicial nominee, the chamber wouldn’t have passed any bills for the latter half of the 1990s. Second, more GOP obstructionism isn’t exactly a dire threat anymore — whether Dems give in to Republicans’ hostage demands or not, the GOP is filibustering every bill that matters. Even if they follow through on their threat, it’ll still just be more of the same.
And third, Southwick is the wrong guy to raise hell over.
From Emily Bazelon’s recent coverage of Southwick’s confirmation hearings:
As a judge on the Mississippi Court of Appeals for 12 years, Leslie Southwick participated in more than 7,000 cases. Now he is President Bush’s nominee for a long-vacant seat on the Fifth Circuit, one of the federal appeals courts. At Southwick’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked him to give an example of an unpopular decision he’d made in favor of somebody downtrodden—a poor person, or a member of a minority group, or someone who’d simply turned to the courts for help. Judge Southwick couldn’t name a single one.
The question might sound like a bit of a stunt. But other data show that Judge Southwick’s answer fits with his larger record. He has a pattern of voting against workers and the injured and in favor of corporations. According to the advocacy group Alliance for Justice, Southwick voted “against the injured party and in favor of business interests” in 160 of 180 cases that gave rise to a dissent and that involved employment law and injury-based suits for damages. When one judge on a panel dissents in a case, there’s an argument it could come out either way, which makes these cases a good measure of how a judge thinks when he’s got some legal leeway. In such cases, Judge Southwick almost never favors the rights of workers or people who’ve suffered discrimination or been harmed by a shoddy product.
And from the NYT’s recent editorial urging the Senate to reject Southwick’s nomination.
President Bush’s latest appeals court nominee, Leslie Southwick, has a disturbing history of insensitivity to blacks and other minority groups. The Senate should reject this nomination and make clear to the White House that it will reject all future nominees who do not meet the high standards of fairness that are essential for such important posts.
A non-negotiable quality for judicial nominees is that they must be committed to equal justice. Judge Southwick, whom President Bush has nominated for a seat on the New Orleans-based United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, repeatedly failed this test as a Mississippi state court judge. […]
When the voters put Democrats in the majority in Congress last fall, they were sending a message that the era of extremism in Washington should come to an end. Senate Democrats can show that they understood this message by rejecting Judge Southwick and insisting on a more moderate nominee, who will respect the rights of all.
And yet, this is the nomination Republicans are ready to wage partisan war over. Even if Southwick’s nomination is defeated by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the GOP is demanding that he receive an up-or-down vote on the floor anyway (another luxury Clinton’s nominees were denied).
The committee vote may come as early as this week. Stay tuned.