There’s a lot of talk online today about how — and whether — centrist Dems can strike a compromise with Republicans on judicial nominations. There are competing ideas about what a plan would look like, but here’s the way the Washington Post described the current state of negotiations:
Negotiators said the toughest task is building sufficient mutual trust among the dozen so they feel confident that neither side will renege on or abuse an understanding that cannot be written in air-tight legalisms. At least six Democrats would agree to filibuster no more judicial nominees this year — including any for the Supreme Court — except in “extraordinary circumstances,” the participants say. In return, at least six Republicans would pledge to oppose Frist’s effort to change the filibuster rule unless the Democrats break their promise.
I fully acknowledge that there may be some room for common ground in this fight, but the proposal described in the Post is misguided to the point of comedy. I don’t want to see Bill Frist successfully execute the nuclear option, and it’s difficult to say right now if the votes are there to beat him, but if this is the state of the discussions, Dems might as well leave the negotiating table now.
This description doesn’t mention how many of the seven controversial nominees would be cleared for confirmation, but some reports indicate that Dems are now willing to give Republicans four of the seven, others suggest it could be as many as five of the seven.
I know this is getting repetitive, but consider the give-and-take as part of this “compromise.” A majority of the offensive judicial nominees would take lifetime positions on the federal bench, and Dems would give up on blocking future nominees who may be just as radical (if not more so), and they’d agree not to block Supreme Court nominees, except for the painfully vague “extraordinary-circumstances” exception.
In return, Dems will get to keep a procedural tactic they already have, which Republicans have used in the past, and which Dems promise not to utilize until 2007.
I’d be funny if it weren’t so ridiculous. Like Matthew Yglesias, I believe it’s starting to sound like these “centrist” Dems have lost sight of the sight of the goal here: we want to keep unqualified jurists off the federal bench.
The negotiations are already stacked in the wrong direction. Dems are clearing the way for several right-wingers to serve on the federal judiciary (for life) in exchange for keeping a procedure they won’t use to keep other right-wingers off the federal judiciary (for life). How six Dem senators became convinced that these discussions are a good idea is completely beyond my comprehension. As Yglesias put it:
The good thing about the filibuster is that it’s letting Democrats keep bad judges off the bench; if the bad judges are going to get on the bench anyway then there’s no particular reason to count upholding a purely theoretical filibuster as a victory in exchange for which we should be trading other stuff away.
Everything I’m hearing suggests the negotiations aren’t going well and will probably break down before Tuesday. I can only hope that’s true.