Bush Demands Action on Judicial Nominees
President Bush accused the Senate of “shameful” inaction on his judicial nominees, lending his voice Thursday to a 30-hour Senate debate over Republican efforts to pry conservative nominees loose from Democratic filibusters.
After an all-night session, senators were bleary-eyed but firmly on message. Republicans insisted there was no precedent for refusing to allow votes on the president’s judicial choices. Democrats said the GOP-led Senate was championing judges who do not represent American mainstream views.
The first overnight session in a decade did little to close the partisan divide over judges that has prevailed since the Clinton presidency. Democrats blocked Republican attempts to bring up three pending nominations for votes. Republicans stopped Democrats from raising issues on the Senate floor such as a higher minimum wage.
Bush was joined by three of his stalled nominees – judges Priscilla Owen of Texas and Carolyn Kuhl and Janice Rogers Brown, both from California – as he demanded that they get an up-or-down vote.
“I have told these three ladies I will stand with them to the bitter end because they’re the absolute right pick for their respective positions,” Bush said. “The senators who are playing politics with their nominations are acting shamefully.”
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said it was regrettable that Bush had “politicized these nominations and raised the level of confrontation within the debate itself.”
To block four nominees to federal appeals courts, Democrats have used procedures that required Republicans to come up with 60 votes to advance the president’s choices. The four are Owen, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, Mississippi judge Charles Pickering and lawyer Miguel Estrada, who has since withdrawn his nomination.
Democrats are also expected to use the 60-vote requirement to stop confirmation of Brown and Kuhl.
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Republicans hoped the debate “might stimulate enough outrage by the American public to sway at least a few more Democratic senators to do the right thing and give these nominees a vote.”
Democrats said they had joined Republicans in confirming 168 judges during Bush’s term in office, stopping only four. They repeated that Republicans were concentrating on finding jobs for those four nominees while paying inadequate attention to the 3 million jobs lost since Bush took office.
The sideshows overshadowed much of the debate as Republicans brought in cots and coffee and invited conservative groups for hourly news conferences through the night. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he had gotten 53 minutes of sleep, then ran four miles on a treadmill.
Democrats brandished posters saying “168-4,” to emphasize their confirmation record. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., had a T-shirt saying “we confirmed 98 percent of President Bush’s judges” on the front, while the back said, “and all we got was this lousy T-shirt.”
But both sides were also aware of the significance of confirming judges – and potential future candidates for the Supreme Court – whose views could affect policy on issues such as abortion, affirmative action and the role of religion in public affairs.
“We’re asked to confirm judges whose decisions can change U.S. history, ” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., spoke of embarking on “a great debate and potentially a collision course, some may say, between those who believe in God, that he has a role to play in the cultural and moral fabric of this nation, and those who prefer to sanitize our public institutions of any reference to God.”
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., spoke in anger about a political ad run by the conservative Committee for Justice suggesting that Democrats were impeding Catholic nominees who oppose abortion.
She said she was ready to vote for Alabama’s Pryor, an anti-abortion Catholic, before she saw the ad. “My father is a Catholic judge and my sister is a Catholic judge. I don’t have problems with Catholic judges, I don’t have problems with William Pryor. I have problems with this red-meat rhetoric that is anti-American, anti-constitutional and defies every principle of this country,” she said.
Frist has scheduled more votes on Friday for Brown, Kuhl and Owen, but Republicans have yet to win any of these votes this year.