Bill Frist will be bringing the Owen and Brown nominations to the floor any minute now, sparking the fight we’ve all been waiting for. Most news outlets reported this morning that a compromise effort has largely fallen apart, but it’s worth noting that Roll Call is reporting that a deal may be fairly close, with the article describing a last-minute compromise as “a real possibility.”
The group [of more than a dozen Senate centrists] held three separate meetings Tuesday afternoon and evening, breaking from Sen. John Warner’s (R-Va.) office shortly before 7 p.m. without an agreement, according to one aide. The group expects to meet again today.
Broadly, signatories of the centrist-sponsored memo would commit to opposing both the nuclear option and future filibusters, while allowing more than half of the already filibustered judicial nominees to be approved.
There are some interesting lawmakers in these meeting, particularly on the Republican side, suggesting that the appetite for the nuclear option may not be as strong as advertised. Even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who considered suing the Senate to stop Dem filibusters in 2003, is now at the table to try and make a deal that would take the nuclear option off the table.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who’s poised to break with her party over this, said a deal had momentum. “I would say more likely than not,” she said.
The problem, of course, are the details of such a deal.
Roll Call noted that different proposals include slightly different language, but four basic principles are the common denominator:
* That four of the seven filibustered nominees would be approved for a vote, with California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown and two of those from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals potentially on the approval list;
* That three would be rejected, with William Myers to the 9th Circuit and Henry Saad to the 6th Circuit possibly on the filibustered list;
* That at least six Democrats would foreswear any other filibusters except in “extraordinary circumstances”;
* That at least six Republicans would foreswear Frist’s effort to end filibusters by the parliamentary, party-line vote now known commonly as the nuclear option.
I hate to sound like a naysayer, but this just isn’t much of a deal for Dems. Dems give up perfectly justified filibusters and clear the way for unqualified jurists to take the federal bench for life and, in exchange, get to keep a right they already have while promising not to use it too much. That’s not a compromise; it’s a gift to the GOP.
The ideal is to keep the status quo, which is working far better than advertised. Bush nominates judges, 95% of them get confirmed, Dems block the extremists, and Republicans whine a lot. And the only way to keep the status quo is for Dems to win the vote on the nuclear option.
Stay tuned.