Today’s Washington Post article on Senate Republicans’ desire to gut the chamber’s filibuster rules:
Republicans [said] that, even though the number of filibustered nominations is small, the Democrats are trampling on the Constitution by denying a straight up-or-down vote for even a single nomination. The Constitution, they note, requires two-thirds majorities for treaties, constitutional amendments and other specific matters but calls for only the “advice and consent” of the Senate on judicial choices, with no reference to any super-majority for confirmation.
The same article:
In 1968, Republicans filibustered President Lyndon B. Johnson’s choice of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas to be chief justice, but Johnson withdrew the nomination in the face of Fortas’s likely rejection by the Senate.
I’m afraid the hypocrisy angle doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
Eugene Oregon reminds us today, for example, that Senate Republicans blocked 53 Clinton judicial nominees, denying these would-be judges a straight up-or-down vote. We block 10 on the Senate floor, it’s unconstitutional; they block 53 in committee, it’s playing by the rules.
But, our Republican friends say, blocking a nominee in committee isn’t the same thing as using a filibuster. They’re both an obvious denial of a straight up-or-down vote, but the GOP used a different tactic (because they could). Committee maneuvering is acceptable, they say, but filibusters are not.
Well, there’s the fact that Senate Republicans clearly didn’t agree when they filibustered Abe Fortas’ nomination to be chief justice in 1968. But, our Republican friends say, that was a long time ago, so it shouldn’t count.
How about just sticking to the Clinton years then? In 1994, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a Clinton nominee to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, prompting Orrin Hatch to say the filibuster “is one of the few tools that the minority has to protect itself and those the minority represents.” In 2000, it was Bill Frist, of all people, who supported a GOP move to block an up-or-down vote on Clinton judicial nominee Richard Paez.
That was then. Now, Frist, like most of his GOP colleagues, call Dem filibusters on the worst of Bush’s judicial nominees “intolerable” and “tyrannical.” It’d be far easier to take their whining seriously if they hadn’t embraced the opposite position just a few years back.