Republicans: We Will NOT Tolerate blocking Bush's Nominees, The End of Fillibusters?

[Ned]

Originally posted by Drachasor


He did answer it. They didn't want a vote because it was very likely the Judges *would* get confirmed. The Moderate Republicans would have sided with the Democrats in all likelihood. Hence the more conservative Republicans worked to make sure that no vote happened. They succeeded quite often.


-Drachasor

Bull! From all news reports I have seen, there has been no use by either party of the filibuster to block judicial appointments until the Democrats began using it in a last few years. What this means is that if any nominee was not confirmed by the Republicans during the Clinton administration, it was not by use of the filibuster but by a straight up-and-down vote, either at the committee level or in the full Senate. This is a lot different from using the filibuster to block a vote at all.

Liberals who accuse Republicans of being antidemocratic are guilty of the very crime of which they accuse the Republicans.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Pax
I'm kind of fond of the idea the founding fathers had against limiting absolute power to prevent tyranny. At this point, I say let the Republicans have everything they want so 20 years from now I can say I told you so from my secret hiding place in the last supposedly free territory. Antartica.

PAX, it is amazing you are here, is it not, given that you were born after Roe v. Wade to a single mother. (I believe I have your family history correct.) Somehow, I suspect your liberalism on the issue of judges is misplaced.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Ned
Oerdin, you still have not answered the question about how the Republicans, with a majority "blocked" Clinton's appointees other than by not confirming them through a vote in the Senate. The opening post was not about whether the nominees were confirmed or not, it is about whether the Republicans were twarting democracy by DEMANDING a VOTE.

Ned, I did respond DIRECTLY to this issue above. Please read it. It spoke about the anti-abortion wing of the Republican party was afraid that moderate and pro-choice Republicans would join Democrats to confirm pro-choice judges. Thus the anti-abortion people filibustered to prevent the votes from taking place.

Did you get it this time?

[KrazyHorse]

"Welcome to the Nedaverse"

[Berzerker]

Ned, the Repubs may not have filibustered judicial nominees but they did use "rules" to prevent up or down votes. Both parties do it because they can, the Senate allows it... Cloture requires 60% so a minority can block alot of stuff (not everything I think). It ends up costing us more and ensuring more pork to the states because more Senators have to be bought...

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Ned
Bull! From all news reports I have seen, there has been no use by either party of the filibuster to block judicial appointments until the Democrats began using it in a last few years.

Please read the thread. I posted several links which gave detailed information of Republican filibusters of Clinton Judicial nominees. We wouldn't have to keep repeating everything if you would read the thread.

[Ramo]

Regarding obstructionism against Clinton, right after he got the chair, Hatch had changed the rules of the Judiciary Committee to allow any single (rather than requiring both) Senator to block nominees from his state, the "blue slip" rule. So the Republicans gained vetoes on nominees from many, many states, and they used it to great effect. So while filibustering wasn't that prevalent (though still happening), huge numbers of Clinton nominees (far more than the number of Bush nominees) were even more anti-democratically (whereas with a filibuster 41 Senators could prevent a vote with a lot of effort, under Hatch's rules, with a blue slip one Senator could prevent a vote with practically no effort) prevented from being brough to a vote. Interestingly enough, Hatch reversed the decision and required both Senators for blue slips when Dear Leader came to office.

[Ned]

Oerdin, I read your links. The filibuster was seldom used by either party until the present. It's first use in this century was by Southern Democrats to block LBJ's ultra-liberal nominee Abe Fortas. Then the Dems went mad, and began blocking a lot of conservative appointees, including Bork.

In either of your links, there is only one filibuster of a Democrat nominee since LBJ, and that was in 2000. Just one.

Read this:

Sometime this year, or maybe next, a vacancy will occur on the Supreme Court. When it does the pundits will remind everybody of the bruising battle over Robert Bork. They will all say that Bork forever changed the politics of judicial appointments. They will all be wrong.

They won't be completely wrong. Bork was big. But by focusing on Bork, they will be missing the larger picture. Step back and you see that standing next to Bork is a long line of failed Supreme Court nominees: Abe Fortas, Homer Thornberry, Clement Haynsworth, G. Harold Carswell, and Douglas Ginsburg.

And as you study our little group portrait, you begin to notice something: All of these nominees failed to win confirmation because their nominations raised social questions about which Americans were deeply divided.

You also begin to notice something else: The fights waged against our little group were vicious and they were vicious beginning with Fortas. It's not Bork whom the pundits should mark as the turning point. It's Fortas.

Civil Rights Battles: The Fate of Fortas, Haynsworth, and Carswell

The six failed nominees listed were nominated by three relatively recent presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, each of whom failed to get two of his nominees confirmed by the Senate.

Not since the Nineteenth Century, when the Senate took a far more independent role in court appointments, have presidents been handed this many defeats. Indeed, LBJ was the first president since Herbert Hoover to see a nomination fail. The last president before Hoover to lose a Supreme Court nominee was Grover Cleveland.

LBJ wanted to elevate Fortas to the position of Chief Justice to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren. Warren had, of course, been closely associated in the public mind with the liberal Warren Court's decisions on race and crime. Billboards in the South featured the message "Impeach Earl Warren."

Fortas's nomination failed because he evoked the same angers Warren had. Russell Long referred to Fortas as one of the "dirty five" on the Warren Court who voted for criminals. Fellow Southerner James Eastland observed during the battle that he had "never seen so much feeling against a man as against Fortas."

After Strom Thurmond mounted a successful filibuster against Fortas–killing Fortas's chances as well as that of the liberal Thornberry, who had been nominated to take Fortas's seat–Democrats vowed they would not soon forget what had happened. And they did not, though it was not until Nixon's second nomination that they had their revenge.

On the campaign trail in 1968, Nixon castigated the Warren Court for going "too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces." After Nixon won the presidency, he was determined to put a so-called strict constructionist on the Court.

Nixon's first nominee, Warren Burger, slipped through quickly during the traditional presidential honeymoon. But the following year Haynsworth, a Southerner, was defeated after suspicions were raised about his commitment to civil rights.

The defeat of Haynsworth served as payback for Fortas: As Senator Gale McGhee (D-WY) conceded, "[h]ad there been no Fortas affair … a man of Justice [sic] Haynsworth's attainments … undoubtedly would have been confirmed."

After Haynsworth's defeat, Nixon, furious, told advisor Harry Dent, "I want you to go out this time and find a good federal judge further south and further to the right." Dent found G. Harold Carswell, who in 1948 had publicly endorsed segregation (and whose nomination was promptly quashed).

From Fortas to Bork: A Marked Increase In Partisanship

We all know about Bork. He was supposed to be the conservatives' fifth vote in a different battle: the battle to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The year before, pro-choice forces had let Antonin Scalia slip by without a fight (only to later regret the day Scalia joined the Court). But when Bork was nominated, the same forces mounted a grassroots campaign the likes of which the capital had never before witnessed in connection with a judicial nomination. The hostility against Bork was so aggressive, it became a verb: All nominees after Bork would have to fear being "Borked."

What changed between the Fortas and the Bork fights, and why? For one thing, the partisanship got worse as the years went by. By the time of Bork's nomination, the battle lines over controversial nominees divided neatly along party lines. Earlier, they had not. For example, seventeen Republican senators voted against Haynsworth — a departure from party loyalty unthinkable a decade later. Just six Republicans voted against Bork.

By the 1980s, the parties had become more ideologically uniform than they ever had been. The conservatives had left the Democratic Party; the liberals had been driven out of the Republican Party.

In 1970, Nixon had made war on moderates like New York's Charles Goodell. By the 1980s, Goodell and all his ideological soul mates–Edward Brooke, Clifford Case, John Sherman Cooper–had either left the party or changed their stripes (like one-time moderate George H.W. Bush).

Pretending That Ideology Is Not the Issue

The sharpening of partisanship in recent years isn't exactly news. But the establishment has been reluctant to accept it. Official Washington likes to pretend that ideology doesn't play the role we all know it does.

That's why senators almost never publicly admit that they oppose a nominee on ideological grounds. Far better to oppose Fortas because he had taken large lecture fees from businesspeople likely to have cases before the Court; to oppose Haynsworth because he had heard cases involving companies in which he held stock; to oppose Carswell because he may have lied to the Senate about his views on race; and to oppose Ginsburg because he had smoked dope with his students at Harvard. (The Democrats actually did not care that he had, but the Republicans did, forcing his withdrawal so that they could remain the party of solid values.)

Only Bork was opposed expressly on ideological grounds, once he had been tarred as an extremist. And still many Democrats claimed that Bork was considered unacceptable because he had concealed his true beliefs — not because of the beliefs themselves. As wags put it, Bork was guilty of "confirmation conversion."

Senators should admit they take ideology into account; there is no shame in that. Nominees' ideological character would not matter if the Court were a mere bystander in the culture wars still raging in America. But the Court is, of course, no mere bystander. The current Court, under its conservative leadership, is now every bit as activist as the liberal Warren Court conservatives once vowed to reel in.

As long as the parties remain internally ideologically uniform, and the Court remains a battleground in ideological wars, our little group of six, beginning with Abe Fortas, is likely to grow larger and larger.

What Do You Think?

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20010809_shenkman.html

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Ned
Oerdin, I read your links. The filibuster was seldom used by either party until the present. It's first use in this century was by Southern Democrats to block LBJ's ultra-liberal nominee Abe Fortas. Then the Dems went mad, and began blocking a lot of conservative appointees, including Bork.

Ned, Dems didn't have to filibuster Bork because they controlled the Congress back in those days. I'm glad you will now finally admite that Republicans also used Filibusters and dirty tricks against Clinton nominees; at least we are making some progress.

In either of your links, there is only one filibuster of a Democrat nominee since LBJ, and that was in 2000. Just one.

If you read the first link I gave it lists three filibusters, Ned. Not one. There were a total of 54 Clinton nominees which never got an up or down vote because of Republican obstructionists so does it really matter how they did it? Admite it Ned, Republicans did the same sort of stuff but to a much worse degree.

10 Bush judges blocked and 201 passed is less then half of the Clinton judges Republicans refused to allow up or down votes on. Why are you crying foul now?

[Ned]

Oerdin, I disagree. Not allowing a nominee past committee by a majority is the same thing as a no vote by a majority. A filibuster happens only when a nominee is approved by committee, but his nomination is blocked by the minority through a filibuster.

On Bork. Yeah, you are right. That was no filibuster.

Let us agree than that the filibuster was used by Republicans three times in the last century. (I will accept your figures the sake of argument.) It was also used by Southern Democrats to block Abe Fortas and Harold Carswell in 1968. The Democrats blocked two of Reagan's appointees but I don't know whether they did so through filibuster. What all the shows us that the use of the filibuster in the last 100 years was very rare until the last five years.

[Dinner]

I can't accept that it was just those three but I do know of at least three which were filibustered by Republicans during the Clinton presidency. The filibuster was relatively rare before that mainly because it was easier to tie nominees up in commitee and thus prevent an up or down vote. That was the main tactic of the minority, however, when Republicans went from being the minority to the majority they didn't want Democrats using the same tricks they had used so they changed the commitee rules.

Thus the recent increase in filibusters. It's one of the only tools the minority has left. Ned, would you agree it is dishonest for a group of people who used proceedural tricks to prevent an up or down vote on 54 judges to now complain when a mire 10 of there judges out of 211 get blocked by precedural tricks?

[Ned]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I can't accept that it was just those three but I do know of at least three which were filibustered by Republicans during the Clinton presidency. The filibuster was relatively rare before that mainly because it was easier to tie nominees up in commitee and thus prevent an up or down vote. That was the main tactic of the minority, however, when Republicans went from being the minority to the majority they didn't want Democrats using the same tricks they had used so they changed the commitee rules.

Thus the recent increase in filibusters. It's one of the only tools the minority has left. Ned, would you agree it is dishonest for a group of people who used proceedural tricks to prevent an up or down vote on 54 judges to now complain when a mire 10 of there judges out of 211 get blocked by precedural tricks?

Your thesis would be correct if one were to assume that the Republicans controlled the Senate for the last 100 years so that they could tie appointments up at the committee level. But the truth, as usual, lies elsewhere. The Republicans controlled the Senate only rarely since Hoover as the Democrats became the majority party in the US. Republicans were in the minority for the bulk of the last 100 years. Yet, in all that time, apparently, they filibustered only three Democrat appointees, again, accepting your figures.

Three.

Only three in more than 100 years.

Just three.

Now, being fair, this could be because the filibuster rules have changed. Now, one can conduct a filibuster by just placing a hold on a matter. Before, one had to actually hold the floor of the Senate, which was physically exhausting. Now holds are common where before filibusters were rare on all sorts of matters. This may justify a rule change to actually require a true filibuster to restore the balance that one existed where filibusters were rare.

[Velociryx]

Yet another piece of evidence of the systematic ATTACK being waged by the right-wingers.

How many more bits of evidence do you people need to see the trend?!



-=Vel=-

[Ned]

Vel, except that the attack is not from the right-wingers. It is from the left who are using the new filibuster rules to effectively create a requirement of 60 votes to confirm a jurist. In the past, the filibuster was very, very rare. Very rare because it actually require physical presence on the floor. Since that is no longer required, the Dems are using the new filibuster rules to effectively change the rules of the Senate to require a 60 vote majority to pass anything.

[Velociryx]

Then the solution, with your Right-Wing....erm...Republican majority, would be to reinstate the old filibuster rules, not re-write the manual to ensure your continued dominance.

That is in the spirit of Democracy...

-=Vel=-