When I left you I was but the learner, now I am the master..

[Kulaf]

And damn it....I just posted that under the wrong thread!

[Relbeek Einre]

I didn't believe or disbelieve anything, Jecks. I just asked for more info.

What I do disbelieve is that it has to do with abortion + Supreme Court in particular, since there are Appeals Court nominees who sailed through, and District Cout nominees being blocked, and I have no reason to believe any of these judges were anything but staunch conservatives.

[Trollbait]

What I do disbelieve is that it has to do with abortion + Supreme Court in particular, since there are Appeals Court nominees who sailed through, and District Cout nominees being blocked, and I have no reason to believe any of these judges were anything but staunch conservatives.

So......This story came out today

Reid: Bush, GOP Seek to Reinvent Reality

May 19, 10:47 AM (ET)

By JESSE J. HOLLAND

(
WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Thursday that President Bush and Republican senators are trying to "rewrite the Constitution and reinvent reality" in their push to confirm controversial judicial nominees.

"The Senate is not a rubber stamp for the executive branch," Reid said. "Rather, we're the one institution where the minority has a voice and the ability to check the power of the majority. Today, in the face of President Bush's power grab, that's more important than ever."

Republicans are threatening to eliminate the Democrats' ability to use filibusters to block Bush's judicial picks, beginning with federal appeals court nominee Priscilla Owen.

Reid says that the Constitution does not require that judicial nominees get confirmation votes, allowing the minority to block them. Bush and other Republicans who argue otherwise "rewrite the Constitution and reinvent reality," he said.



Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he will call a vote next week on whether Republican senators are willing to let the minority Democrats continue to block the White House's judicial appointments through filibusters.

"The principle is that judicial nominees with support of a majority of United States senators deserve a fair up-or-down vote on the floor of the United States Senate," Frist said.

But while senators argue over Owen's nomination on the Senate floor, the driving force in backroom negotiations in the Capitol is how senators will treat a future Supreme Court nominee if a vacancy opens up in the next two years.

"This whole debate, for me, is about the Supreme Court," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of the Senate negotiators who scurried from office to office Wednesday trying to work out a deal that would avoid a showdown over whether to block the use of filibusters against judicial nominees. "What do you do with the next level? Can you get the Senate back to more of a normal working situation?"

Senate negotiators were to get back to work Thursday trying to find a compromise on confirming Owen and the seven other U.S. Appeals Court nominees. But while lower court nominees are at the forefront of the argument, the clear subtext of the debate is how the Senate will treat a future Supreme Court nominee from President Bush.



Republican leaders are concerned that Democrats want to enshrine judicial filibusters in the Senate so they can block a future Bush nominee to the nation's highest court, along with Owen and the six other lower court nominees they already have blocked using the parliamentary tactic that requires 60 votes to overcome.

While there are no current vacancies, Supreme Court watchers expect a retirement before the end of Bush's presidency. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who is 80, is fighting thyroid cancer.

"When a Supreme Court position becomes open the issue will be, will it require 60 votes to approve a Supreme Court judge - something that's never required - or will it be a majority vote? Must we have a super majority?" said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

But Democrats worry that Republicans want to get rid of judicial filibusters so the White House can use the Senate's GOP majority to ram through a nominee that Democrats will find extreme and objectionable. If such a move were to succeed, it would give the GOP full control over which nominees could be confirmed for lifetime judgeships since the party controls the White House and has a 55-44-1 majority in the Senate.

"If Republicans roll back our rights in this chamber, there will be no check on their power," Reid said. "The radical right wing will be free to pursue any agenda they want. And not just on judges. Their power will be unchecked on Supreme Court nominees, the president's nominees in general and legislation like Social Security privatization."

Senate centrists hope to avoid both options. If they can get 12 senators to agree to a deal - six Republicans and six Democrats - they can prevent Frist from banning judicial filibusters and keep Reid from filibustering Bush appointees.

Under the most recent Republican-crafted offer, Democrats would have to allow the confirmation of six Bush nominees: Owen, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, former Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, as well as Michigan nominees Susan Neilson, David McKeague and Richard Griffin. The Senate would scuttle the nominations of Idaho lawyer William Myers and Michigan nominee Henry Saad, aides said.

But more importantly, both sides would have to operate on "good faith" when it comes to future nominations. Republicans would be bound not to ban judicial filibusters only if Democrats forswear judicial filibusters on court nominees except for extraordinary situations, aides said.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are being held behind closed doors.

"If we can get through this week, really, get through these eight, I think calmer heads will prevail down the road and we'll have a better chance of dealing with the Supreme Court nominees in a traditional way," Graham said.

It is totally about the Supreme Court. On both sides of the aisle.

[Klast Brell]

I really wish people would drop the "tradition" argument. To accept it you have to accept the premise that it's OK for a single Senator to block a nominee from getting a hearing in committee. It’s ok for 10 senators on the committee to block a nominee from getting a vote on the floor. But it’s an earthshaking disaster if 45 senators do the blocking.

[Trollbait]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u ... earoptions

By William F. Buckley Jr.
Fri Apr 22, 7:58 PM ET



If you collected weighty words during the past week, and agreed to exclude any that dealt with the fractious stock market and with the resurgence of the insurgencies, you would have heard the end-of-the-world talk about the American judiciary. It is worse than astonishing that the thunderclaps focused on only one aspect of the division, betokening as it does the sheer refusal to use one's eyes or concentrate one's mind.


Critics of the direction we are apparently headed in use grave language. The senators are on a "collision course." By this is meant the looming fight on the Senate floor over the filibuster, in which Sen. Bill Frist (news, bio, voting record), R-Tenn., is threatening to use the "nuclear option."

Mr. Frist will report the Judiciary Committee's findings on, e.g., Janice Rogers Brown. The committee has approved her by a vote of 10-8. He will submit the recommendation of the Judiciary Committee and ask for a vote.

A voice from the rear: "The senator from Tennessee asks unanimous consent."

That does it. There being no unanimous consent, the naysayers begin to make their points, all of this done routinely, thus avoiding the kind of stage-arresting apocalypse Mr. Smith went through when he went to Washington. No, this is much much more genteel -- you're no longer required to carry a catheter. Legerdemain does its work, and the entire house knows if there is any prospect of invoking cloture, which, to succeed, requires a vote deploying all forces in residence.

Changing that rule would mean that the two or three contentious candidates would be awarded their judgeships by a simple majority vote. Viewing the process beginning to end, you have the nominee appointed by the president, submitting to examination by a Senate committee, and voted into office by the majority of the senators.

That doesn't smell nuclear, but everyone uses the term because changing the number of votes required to end a filibuster means shredding the sheet anchor to windward. The filibuster is held in high esteem as the last refuge against plebiscitary williwaws that storm the popular will, sweeping away venerable threads of sobriety and caution.

That is one view of it. The longer view does rise to nuclear eminence. It is the extent to which the judiciary has assumed the legislative burden.

There are many issues that divide the country's legislatures, but consider only two of them, abortion rights and civil rights.

In the latter of these, we had a showdown at the law school at the University of Michigan in 2003. The plaintiffs were white students who argued that they were being deprived of equal protection of the law because preference was being given to applicants not because of objective merit but for the special reason of race. The court by the narrowest majority ruled to OK this anti-meritocratic practice because in future life the lawyers would be contending with mixed-race communities, and the only way to prepare them is to replicate that mixture in the law schools.

No one believes that Grutter v. Bollinger is the last word on the subject.

Just when abortion rises to constitutional status is of course always being argued, as are other contingencies, like the health of the mother, the rights and responsibilities of the father, the availability of assistance and the age of the mother.

And yet the candidate for a judicial post is weighed by solid senatorial flanks not on what the candidate might have to say in illuminating legal and constitutional questions, but on how he can be predicted to vote given his background on this issue.

That abdication to the courts of authority to weigh important questions of public policy is infinitely greater in democratic consequence than arrangements by which the majority of the Senate may assert itself, yet it is this, the filibuster, that gets the attention. The correct approach is an intelligent but systematic reduction of the courts' authority, e.g., to decide at what age a person may be sentenced to capital punishment.

[Akhbarali]

It is totally about the Supreme Court. On both sides of the aisle.

I don't agree with the word "totally" but if you replace that with "primarily" I would agree for sure. This is a showdown that is setting the stage for a future showdown (specifically, the Gonzales nomination to the SC).

Akhbar

[Trollbait]

I will concede that "primarily" is a better choice of syntax.