Three cheers for the Democrats' filibuster
It's time to depoliticize the judicial appointment process.
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By John W. Dean
Nov. 13, 2003 | Most news accounts of the U.S. Senate's planned 30-hour talkathon -- or filibuster, or reverse filibuster, or whatever this exercise in through-the-night speechifying should be called -- have evoked references to Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." But I keep thinking about Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." No question it's theater -- that's why the Republicans are staging it -- but what's the script?
Ostensibly, Senate Republican leaders are forcing this oratorical marathon to highlight the Democrats' success in using the mere threat of a filibuster to block President Bush's ultraconservative judicial nominees. In fact, the Democrats have only used this threat in four instances, with the Senate confirming 168 of Bush's judicial nominees. Still, Republicans are pouting and pissed, even though they played the same kind of serious hardball with President Clinton's judicial nominees.
Republicans denied confirmation to more than one-third of Clinton's nominees for the Court of Appeals, and in many instances the Republican-controlled Senate during the Clinton years refused to even hold hearings on judicial nominees. Yet by effectively blocking four appellate court nominees -- Miguel Estrada (who has now withdrawn), Charles Pickering, Priscilla Owen and Bill Pryor -- the Democrats have put the Republicans into a tizzy, so they're determined to provide Americans with a 30-hour C-SPAN tantrum.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/11/13/senate_rules/index.html
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