Fristing at the Mouth

Last year, Republicans lacked the votes to implement the so-called "nuclear option," which would exclude Democrats from the process of approving judicial nominees. Since the election, however, an expanded Republican majority has emboldened Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

In his opening remarks to the 109th Congress, Frist threatened the rule change. Then, in a much publicized speech before the right-wing Federalist Society, Frist denounced the filibuster as a "formula for tyranny by the majority." Now, Frist claims he has lined up the 51 votes necessary to prevent Democrats from having any say whatsoever in how the Senate confirms the next batch of socially conservative Bush judges. Just yesterday Bush renominated twenty failed judicial nominees, including seven of the ten that Democrats rejected in his first term.

Under the "nuclear option," Republicans would ask the chamber's presiding officer, who happens to be Vice President Dick Cheney, whether Democratic filibusters are unconstitutional. After Cheney rewrites history by declaring them so, only a simple majority of 51 votes is needed to uphold the ruling, as opposed to the 60 votes required to break a filibuster or the 67 votes required to change the rules under normal procedures. If invoked, the next Supreme Court opening could be filled without any Democrat support, even if four Republicans defect from the party line.

"We need to restore the over 200-year tradition and precedent of allowing every nominee of the president who has majority support an up-or-down vote," Frist told the Washington Times. Amidst this aggressive disinformation campaign, you'd think Democrats were impeding Senate business the same way Republicans shut down the Congress in 1995. In fact, Democrats blocked only ten of the president's 229 first-term judicial nominees. In contrast, Republicans stopped a full third of Bill Clinton's appeals court nominees from 1995 and 2000 and derailed a total of sixty overall judicial appointments, six times the damage Democrats have done. Bush appointees now account for 23.2 percent of all federal judges and 20 percent of all Circuit Court judges across the country. The vacancy rate on the federal courts is at its lowest level in 16 years.

In justifying his party's past obstructionism, former Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch called the filibuster "one of the few tools the minority has to protect itself and those the minority represents." Frist personally supported an unsuccessful filibuster against Judge Richard Paez in March 2000.

Maybe that's why Frist now calls the "nuclear option" the "constitutional option." Cloaking radical ideas in comforting language is a strategy that long precedes the GOP's recent filibuster flip-flop.

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