Last month, the National Association of Manufacturers, led by president and CEO John Engler, a longtime Bush ally, announced that it was getting into the judicial nominee game. NAM, though not an obvious choice for a fight over would-be judges, announced a multimillion-dollar campaign on behalf of Republican efforts to stack the courts and, possibly, the GOP’s “nuclear option.” As Salon reported, “A spokesperson for the business group says that securing approval of Bush’s appellate court nominees is now its top priority.”
It’s good to know, therefore, that Dems won’t be fighting the conservative surge alone.
Senate Democrats and their interest-group allies are sharpening their pre-emptive attacks against a GOP effort to end judicial filibusters, launching a series of ad campaigns and expanding the coalition to include big labor.
In a series of moves designed to be their final prelude to a Supreme Court nomination fight, Democrats and their allies hope to duplicate the level of coordination they have brought to bear on President Bush’s effort to revamp Social Security.
Senior Democratic aides will meet today at AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street Northwest with top union officials and other interest groups involved in the effort to turn back President Bush’s judicial nominations. Aides and leaders of those groups said the union presence was a big first step forward on an issue labor has been only nominally affiliated with in recent years. Also expected at the meeting are officials from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union.
“We very much want to expand the coalition,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, one of the most active groups in opposing Bush’s nominees.
This is exactly what the Dems need to survive this fight.
When it comes to Bush’s most contentious judicial nominees, the right’s factions (cultural conservatives, Big Business) are united. They see a conservative judiciary as an integral ingredient to their collective future — corporate interests want rulings that will weaken business regulations, cultural interests want the law to cater to their religious agenda.
Their cohesion, fortunately, has prompted the Dems’ factions to do the same thing. In fact, without some Republican defections, the “nuclear option” will pass, so the left is planning to keep the pressure on in a targeted way.
While the extent of foot soldiers and dollars deployed by labor in the filibuster fight is still undetermined, Aron’s group and another longtime agitator in the nomination battles, People For the American Way, are beginning their own TV ad campaigns designed to gin up opposition to the “nuclear option” Republicans are eyeing to end filibusters.
The Alliance for Justice’s ads, produced by Democratic media consultant Will Robinson, will include a national cable campaign as well as a regional component targeting specific Senators whose votes could prove decisive if Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) makes the push to unilaterally end filibusters of judicial nominees later this spring.
Aron declined to say how much money was going into the group’s campaign or which Senators would be targeted. “That will be in some red and blue states,” she said.
People For the American Way this week is launching a “multimillion-dollar” campaign produced by the Glover Park Group, complete with TV, radio and print ads targeting Republican Senators in 18 states, according to Ralph Neas, the group’s president.
Defeating the nuclear option, Neas said, “is our No. 1 priority.”
He has deployed 75 of the 120 staffers in his downtown Washington office to focus solely on the filibuster battle, creating a “war room” for his group and other members of the coalition in his 2,500-square-foot conference room.
I suspect most Americans have never heard of or considered the merits of the “nuclear option,” but DC’s progressives seem to have stumbled upon a winning formula: keep the caucus together, rally all the factions, take the message to the public. It’s worked (so far) against privatization of Social Security, so it’s the natural game plan to take on the judicial nominee fight.
Will it work? We’ll see. Dems start with 45 votes, which gives them a magic number of six — six Republicans have to vote against the nuclear option to prevent it from being implemented. Right now we appear to have two of the six firmly opposed to the change (McCain, Chafee), four leaning the Dems’ way (Hagel, Snowe, Collins, Specter), and three toss-ups (Warner, Sununu, Voinovich).
Stay tuned.