BLOG | Posted 05/24/2005 @ 2:16pm
The Nation
Capital Games
The Senate will not be nuked. As the doomsday clock ticked down, seven so-called moderates from each party concocted a deal that was more of a win for the Republicans than the Democrats.
Under this brokered arrangement, three of Bush's right-wing nominees for appellate courts--Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor Jr.--will not be filibustered. In return--so to speak--the filibuster will remain a weapon the Democrats can use in the future against other judicial nominees but only "under extraordinary circumstances." What qualifies as "extraordinary circumstances"? That was not defined.
What does all this mean? At issue were five judicial nominees. The Republicans ended up with concrete gains: three conservatives (including one--Rogers Brown--who has declared that government is the enemy of civilization) will presumably be confirmed. What happens to the others--Henry Saad and William Myers--is uncertain. Saad's nomination is already in trouble (perhaps because of allegations within his FBI file). Myers could be a candidate for a filibuster. But the Democrats did not walk out of the room with a hard-and-fast right to resort to a filibuster. With this compromise, they are only able to wield a judicial filibuster if seven Republican senators agree the situation is "extraordinary." In essence, a small band of moderate GOPers will now have veto power over the Democrats' use of the judicial filibuster.
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Frist and the Republican right had aimed to eliminate the judicial filibuster, and they did fail in that mission. But they succeeded in dramatically weakening the filibuster--possibly to the point of rendering it inoperable. Social conservative leader James Dobson decried the compromise as a loss for the Republicans. But undermining the filibuster is certainly more of a gain than a defeat for the GOP.
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