Hatch To Democrats: A Filibuster? Bring It On…
In yet another sign that you can take Alito’s confirmation to the bank, liberal activists are backing down while conservatives are positively glowing:
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) predicted that Alito will win the backing of all 55 GOP senators, including those who support abortion rights and those who joined a bipartisan effort last year to avert a showdown over judicial filibusters. He practically dared Democrats to try a filibuster, a tactic in which they could block a vote on Alito’s confirmation unless 60 senators agreed to end debate. Democrats used the procedure to block several appellate court nominees in Bush’s first term.
“If they want to filibuster, frankly, bring it on,” Hatch said. In return, he predicted, Republicans would change Senate rules to ban judicial filibusters.
Democrats generally avoided mentioning the tactic. “We’ve still got a ways to go to figure what the strategy is going to be,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the committee’s best-known liberal, said in an interview.
Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) issued a statement criticizing Alito but not mentioning a filibuster. “I have not forgotten that Judge Alito was only nominated after the radical right wing of the president’s party forced Harriet Miers to withdraw,” he said, referring to Bush’s earlier choice for the slot.
The White House thinks Alito will win 60 to 70 votes for confirmation, short of the 78 votes Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. received last year, said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending senators’ sensibilities. One Senate Democrat, Ben Nelson (Neb.), said yesterday that he has seen nothing “that I would consider a disqualifying issue against Judge Alito.”
I put the odds against a filibuster at 7-1…
The Republican party would be hurting itself if it changed the senate rules to ban any sort of filibuster.
Its been that way for hundreds of years, no reason to change it now. Not only that, but it exists so that the minority party can halt actions of the majority. There’s no point in having parties if the majority can just ram things through all day long. If they changed the senate rules, you can bank on the Republican party taking it up the a** the next time control of the chamber shifts.
It also shows the public, and independants like myself, just how obstinate and unwilling to compromise the party is becoming.
That aside, my major concern about Alito is that it seems like he favors broad executive powers. If he is going to sit there and defer to everything the president wants to do, I have a problem with that. Examples include throwing American citizens in jail without any of their due process rights, unlawful searches, privacy.
“If they changed the senate rules, you can bank on the Republican party taking it up the a** the next time control of the chamber shifts.”
You must have forgotten the way Bork and Thomas had to take it when they went through the witch – hunts themselves – or perhaps you think the Dems were playing by the Marquis de Queensbury rules back then (more like the Marquis de Sade).
Independent voter, my eye. The reason we’re in this mess in the first place is because the Dems decided to make the confirmation process entirely personal, and ugly as hell (please see the Ralph Neas charming playbook for further details), and they’re paying the price for those transgressions.
There has been a long – standing story going around that quotes Thomas telling a colleague, “They gave me the finger during my confirmation, and I’m going to spend the next 30 years giving them the finger back.”
The Dems will soon learn that as you reap, so shall you sow.
“There’s no point in having parties if the majority can just ram things through all day long…”
If you look carefully, that’s what a majority party is supposed to be doing. Democracy is not a classroom exercise, and the country is not effectively governed by pluralities.
If the Dems don’t like it, for goodness sake, they need to start finding electable candidates and getting majorities in the House and Senate.
You are right; but, that is a terrible attitude to have. Democracy doesn’t function in its most idealistic sense; however, I think that in our represenative government a nice balance can be achieved. A monarchy or a dictatorship are very effective ways of governing a country. So why shouldn’t we have one of those? Let’s just get rid of the other two parts of government because they slow down decision making.
I think one of the reasons that the founders did things the way they did is to make decision making intentionally slow. It takes (and should take) a long time to make decisions. That way, temporary majorities are marginalized. That is why court appointments are lifetime deals – so that that they aren’t affected by swings in majority opinions. The founders were terrified by majorities, and so am I.
The confirmation process should be personal because I want to know what I’m getting. Once they’re in it is almost impossible to get rid of them.
I would be the first to agree with you that the tenet of “advice and consent” is effectively dead these days – more’s the pity. And here’s a surprise – although I was not a Bill Clinton fan, I believe that he was saved from his worst tendencies when there was a divided House and Senate, the so – called “gridlock” effect. Everyone on both sides griped about this continually, which lead me to believe that it wasn’t such a bad situation for the country to find itself in.
I think if Bush had come into office with a similar dynamic at work, he would’ve been reined in as well from some of his more obvious overreaches.
Both the White House and TradeSports are both guestimating 60-70 votes to confirm. A filibuster seems distinctly unlikely, to say the least.
It’s time to start looking at what controversial cases (especially 5-4 cases with O’Connor, Souter, Stevens, Breyer and Ginsberg as the five) would turn out differently with Alito on the bench…
From memory, the big one seems to be the pair of Michigan affirmative action cases, where O’Connor split the baby in half. I’m fairly shocked that we haven’t heard this discussed in the context of C.A.P. yet. It was never credible that Justice Alito would be voting to overturn Plessy or Brown v Board of Ed. but Grutter v. Bollinger?
I’m not a lawyer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think President Bush just wiped out race-based college admissions.
I believe that’s one of the first cases they’ll try to submit again, once he’s sworn in.
Interesting point Clint. The reporting (and Democrats) all talked about CAP as an organization that opposed the admission of women and minorities but my reading elsewhere indicated that CAP was opposed to affirmative action – a very different thing. Alito could very well be the swing vote in an anti-affirmative action decision. Which I would argue is a positive.
Sam Alito was a Princeton undergraduate from 1968 to 1972. As it happens, I grew up in Princeton and was a high school student for those four years. To put things mildly, it was a crazy time: Kent State, Woodstock, the Chicago Eight, and Willy Burlingham (a Princeton undergraduate who thought he could stop the war by blowing up the Engineering building, but succeeded only in stinking up the place after he put gasoline-soaked rags in the HVAC system). Bob Dylan got an honorary doctorate at Princeton (and memorialized the event with “Day of the Locusts” on the New Morning album).
Princeton, which had always been a fairly conservative place, was torn apart. On the one hand, Pink Floyd played at McCarter Theater – on the other, the white shoe Wall Street types would come every year for the annual P-Rade. CAP was a group of students and alumni who were on the conservative side of the culture wars of the day. Princeton had recently gone co-ed, and there was some backlash against that. However, it was basically an innocuous group which gathered in the eating clubs to drink gin and tonics and talk about how great things were in the good old days.
To try to make Alito into some kind of Luddite because of CAP is just ludicrous. It’s as silly as digging up John Kerry quotes from when he was at Viet Vets Against the War and insisting that what you say at 25 is somehow relevant to what you believe at 55. George Bush got a free pass for saying that when he was young and stupid, he did things which were young and stupid. Alito deserves the same.
Peter: well said. I find it interesting that during the hearings the Dems spent a LOT of time hashing and rehashing the same point (Vanguard, CAP, etc.) rather than focusing in on the broader issue (affirmative action versus anti-women and minorities). Which leads this cynic to believe that questioning Alito wasn’t the point – speaking to the base was…
Oh, and can I add: what is up with Biden and the Princeton hat? He bloviates without purpose, comes out and says, essentially, I won’t vote for him (Alito), and decries the process as useless, and then he puts on the hat, playfully? What a dickhead! In my business they call that Grin F*&#ing, which ain’t a good thing.
I wouldn’t be unhappy if affirmative action got shot down. I’m primarily concerned with civil liberties issues.
“It’s as silly as digging up John Kerry quotes from when he was at Viet Vets Against the War and insisting that what you say at 25 is somehow relevant to what you believe at 55…”
I believe I know a few Vietnam veterans who saw active combat during the war who would have quite a different viewpoint regarding that statement, as well as a few POW’s who had to listen to said comments replayed to them by tape during their “sessions.”