SCOTUS filibuster watch (Bring It On edition). Holy crap—or should I say, Holy Joe? Even Joe Lieberman's getting in on the "extraordinary circumstances" action:

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political architect, said precedents from the most recent Supreme Court vacancies suggest that opposition-party senators have a responsibility to back a president's choice if they believe a nominee is qualified, even if they disagree with the person's views. He also maintained that a strongly held ideological stance would not amount to "extraordinary circumstances" justifying a Democratic filibuster under a recent bipartisan Senate deal.

But several Senate Democrats who co-authored that deal countered that ideology is a legitimate line of inquiry and potentially a reason to block a nomination. "In my mind, extraordinary circumstances would include not only extraordinary personal behavior but also extraordinary ideological positions," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), a moderate the White House has been hoping to enlist to give bipartisan backing to the nominee.

The schism in interpretation suggested that the Senate filibuster deal crafted just two months ago to resolve an impasse over lower-court judicial nominations could unravel in the higher-stakes fight over the first Supreme Court vacancy in more than a decade.

Peter Baker and Charles Babington, " Are a Nominee's Views Fair Game?"

Babington co-authored the Steno Sue article I wrote about on Monday—an article which claimed, on the basis of Republican assertions and one, lonely, misread quote from a spokesman for Ben Nelson, that the filibuster deal had put the Democrats in a "bind" when it came to mustering opposition to an extremist Bush nominee on ideological grounds. That article dishonestly tried to play its paucity of sources as representing some kind of general view on the part of "key members" of the Gang of 14 that their deal militated against a Supreme Court filibuster. Freed from the GOP-mandated constraints of Steno Sue journalism, today's piece does actually interview more than one "key member," four of them to be exact, including Lieberman, in what amounts to a deliberate (though of course unacknowledged) walk-back of the earlier report.

Yet several key Democratic senators -- including some who helped craft the recent bipartisan deal -- said yesterday that a nominee's positions on issues would be part of the consideration. ... Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the 14 who fashioned the agreement, said through a spokesman: "A nominee's political ideology is only relevant if it has been shown to cloud their interpretation of the law. . . . A pattern of irresponsible judgment, where decisions are based on ideology rather than the law, could potentially be 'extraordinary.' "

Sen. Ken Salazar (Colo.) rejected Republican assertions that he and other Democratic signers must accept a nominee as conservative as Janice Rogers Brown, now confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, because the agreement allowed her confirmation. "It didn't set a standard" for Supreme Court confirmations, Salazar said. "We would leave it up to each person to define what extraordinary circumstance means."

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), however, said judicial activism concerns him more than ideology. "Are they going to be an activist?" Nelson asked rhetorically in discussing what might cause him to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee. "Their political philosophy may not bother me at all if they're not going to be an activist."

And while none of these statements—especially Nelson's—is without its mush quotient (how is it possible that it's Joe Lieberman exhibiting the most spine here?), I'd say at this point there's just no room, on the evidence, to assume that Senate Democrats are inclined to pre-empt themselves when it comes to using every weapon they've got against a far-right SCOTUS nominee. More specifically, that the Gang of 14 Democrats are inclined to pre-empt themselves (or their colleagues). And that's good news.

posted by michael  1:11:40 PM  
tell me about it []  trackback []

 

SCOTUS filibuster watch. Maybe they're going in alphabetical order. On Sunday—in the only actual piece of news in Sue Schmidt's much-discussed WaPo article, however drowned it was in Republican spin—Joe Biden said a knock-down-drag-out was likely if Janice Brown were to be nominated for the Supreme Court vacancy, despite her having been just lately approved under the Gang of 14 agreement for the appelate court, and intimated that (in the language of the agreement) the Supreme Court in itself represented an "extraordinary circumstance" and thus fair game for the filibuster. Now we've got Barbara Boxer (via Bitch, Ph.D.) doing the honors:

Democrats are prepared to filibuster to block any anti-abortion nominee proposed to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said Tuesday.

"The filibuster is on the table. It's been on the table for 200 years," Boxer said when asked what methods could be used to block a Supreme Court candidate who would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, the three-decade old decision legalizing abortion. ...

Boxer called a threat to legalized abortion an "extraordinary circumstance." "It means a minimum of 5,000 women a year will die. So all options are on the table," she said.

Boxer, of course, is no moderate and no Gang of 14 signatory: so this doesn't tell us anything about how a filibuster threat will play out. Still, the more of this sort of language emerges from Senate Democrats, the more I take heart. Despite the fears of our more alarmist brothers and sisters, it doesn't look like the Dems are quite ready to succumb yet to Lindsey Graham's Jedi mind tricks.

posted by michael  11:08:06 AM  
tell me about it []  trackback []