Trackbacked at Stop The ACLU, Wizbang:
On January 24 the Judiciary Committee favorably recommended Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate. But will a Senate vote ever come?
Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid objected to a move by GOP leaders to schedule a final vote on his confirmation on January 30. Democratic Senator John Kerry* of Massachusetts has already started lobbying his Democratic colleagues to filibuster the Alito nomination. Republicans and the White House are pushing to have the final vote before Bush gives his State of the Union speech January 31.
(* = The haughty, French-looking Democrat, who lost to Bush in the 2004 presidential election, who accuses U.S. servicemen of “going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children” and claimed that U.S. servicemen “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the power, cut off limbs, [blew] up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside” in Vietnam.)
Massachusetts’ most public embarassment, Senator Ted Kennedy**, also said he would support a filibuster. Kennedy told reporters that at least five Democrats are on board supporting the filibuster, and he said he expects others to join the effort.
(** = a.k.a. ‘Captain Chappaquiddick’, who, in his sophomore year at Harvard, was expelled for cheating, who never rose above the rank of private in the U.S. Army, and who left Mary Jo Kopechne to slowly drown in six feet of water in his submerged Oldsmobile after drunkenly driving into Poucha Pond.)
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist filed a motion to cut off debate on the Alito nomination. Republican leaders would need to find only one more Democrat to thwart a filibuster attempt. Frist’s motion, which requires 60 votes under Senate rules, will come up for a vote at 4:30 p.m. Monday. If successful, senators will then vote on Alito’s nomination at 11 a.m. Tuesday, with a simple majority of 51 votes needed for approval. Under the present rules, 60 votes are required for cloture, the ending of a debate. Without the 60 votes (also called a Super Majority) the Democrats have the opportunity to debate Alito until the Second Coming of Jesus, effectively preventing any confirmation of Alito.
In May seven Democrats joined seven Republicans in agreeing to oppose Democratic filibusters of some Bush judicial nominees and any attempt by Republican leaders to change Senate rules to end the practice, except under “extraordinary circumstances.” So far, that agreement has held. I
Republicans say that Democrats have abused the filibuster by blocking 10 of the president’s 229 judicial nominees in his first term. Describing the filibusters as intolerable, Frist has hinted before he may resort to the unusual parliamentary maneuver, dubbed the “nuclear option,” to thwart such filibusters.
The arguments for or against the “nuclear option” are essentially over whether a simple majority (51/100) of the Senate should be able to confirm a judicial nominee, or whether a three-fifths vote (60/100) should be required, as required for passage of a large amount of Senate business.
The “nuclear option” is a phrase used to refer to the method by which a change can be made to the rules of the U.S. Senate with only a simple majority vote rather than the two thirds vote historically used. The nuclear option, as envisioned, would allow a Senator to raise, as a point of order, that a particular rule was unconstitutional. In this instance, the rule change that was contemplated would have allowed 51 senators (including the Vice President) to stop a filibuster on judicial nominees.
The U.S. Constitution does not explicitly require either a two-thirds or three-fifths or majority vote for confirmation of nominees. The text of the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate for confirming treaties, expelling one of its members, and concurring in the proposal of Constitutional Amendments. In all other matters, the Constitution gives the Senate the power to make its own rules. Starting with the first Senate in 1789, the rules left no room for a filibuster; a simple majority could move to bring the matter to a vote. However, in 1806, the rule allowing a majority to bring the previous question ceased to exist. The filibuster became possible, and since any Senator could now block a vote, 100% support was required to bring the matter to a vote. A rule change in 1917 introduced cloture, permitting a two-thirds majority to end debate, and a further change in 1975 reduced the cloture requirement to three-fifths.
Alito, Senate, Democrat, Kerry, filibuster, Republican, Kennedy
