Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, issued a warning to Democrats
that the newly strengthened Republican majority would not allow filibusters to block
action on judicial nominees in President Bush's second term.
"One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end," Dr. Frist,
Republican of Tennessee, said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative
lawyers' group. "The Senate must do what is good, what is right, what is reasonable
and what is honorable."
With the possibility of multiple vacancies on the Supreme Court in coming months, the
comments suggest that Republicans intend to take a harder line with Democrats than they
did when the Senate was more narrowly divided in insisting on floor votes for Mr. Bush's
judicial choices.
Democrats have blocked votes on 10 nominees to federal appeals courts while approving a
vast majority of Mr. Bush's choices for the federal bench. Republicans and Democrats also
struck a deal that allowed many nominees to be confirmed in exchange for White House
agreement not to use its power to appoint judges when Congress recesses.
Dr. Frist did not specify what action Republicans would take if Democrats sought to derail
a nominee through the procedural tactic, a maneuver that requires 60 votes to overcome,
when the new Congressional term begins in January. Republicans gained four seats in the
elections, bringing them to 55, but still short of a filibusterproof majority.
The Senate Rules Committee approved a plan last year that would gradually lower the
threshold for filibusters against judicial nominees until a simple majority would allow a
final vote. But a change in the rules requires 67 votes, and lacking anything near that
support, the proposal never went to the floor.
Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who is chairman of the Rules Committee, has
been among the Republicans who have also suggested that the Republicans try to win a
change by seeking a ruling from the chairman, a position that a Republican would hold,
that filibusters against executive nominations are unconstitutional. A favorable ruling
would require just a majority to uphold.
Some Republicans have been reluctant to try that maneuver. They call it the nuclear
option, because it could come back to haunt them if they are in the minority. Democrats
have also threatened to tie up the Senate in knots if they lose their right to filibuster
in that manner.
"To implement it would make the last Congress look like a bipartisan tea party,"
Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, said.
"For the sake of country and some degree of comity, I would hope and pray that the
majority leader would not take away the Senate's time-honored, 200-year-old
tradition."
Dr. Frist told the members of the Federalist Society that Democrats were abusing the
filibuster by extending it to the Senate's role of confirming presidential nominees.
"This filibuster is nothing less than a formula for tyranny by the minority," he
said, adding that if Democrats use procedural tactics to block more nominees, they
"will have effectively seized from the president the power to appoint judges."
His comments show how the issue of judicial appointments is moving to the fore after the
elections, because of questions about the health of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist,
who has been given a diagnosis of thyroid cancer, and the possibility that other justices
may step down in the next four years.
Theodore B. Olson, who resigned in July as solicitor general, also spoke to the society
and said that Mr. Bush would have the opportunity to name up to three justices and that
their confirmation fights would be intense. |
