The Fillibuster Countdown

The countdown to mass chaos in the Senate has begun. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has indicated that he plans to bring Judge Priscilla Owen and Judge Janice Owens Brown up for an up-or-down vote this week. He knows, as does any other Washington watcher, that this will bring the “Nuclear Option” showdown to a head. The gauntlet has been thrown. The game of chicken has begun. Will the Democrats fillibuster? If they do, Frist intends to bring the “nuclear option” to a vote.

Now there is a point here. Actually a few. And there’s some good and valid points on both sides.

I watched Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia on C-Span the other night as he challenged the majority leader not to squash free speech on the floor of the United States Senate. I stopped counting how many times he repeated himself after a dozen times. He has a point in that the fillibuster is an practice as old as the Senate itself (almost). The Senate was formulated on the model of the British House of Lords which were not elected. The Senate, of course, is not like the House of Lords because it is not a royalty thing, nor are they lifetime members. But Senators have longer terms with the intention that they would take a long time to deliberate over important issues of state and not arrive at rash conclusions. The fillibuster was a tool that gave everyone, including the minority party, the opportunity to be heard and the opportunity to engage in debate.

Let me say, for the record, that the current usage of the fillibuster is not that. The fillibuster today is used to block legislation that a party disagrees on. And where a fillibuster was once used as an orchestrated effort by a party, now any single Senator who wishes to hold up legislation to slide a pork piece of legislation into a bill can do so by using the fillibuster. And the only way to kill a fillibuster is with a 3/5 majority vote of 60 Senators.

Now the Republicans have a point too. Confirmation hearings were setup in Article II: Section 2 of the Constitution to simply “Advise and Consent” (note, not Advise or Consent) to judicial nominees. In other words, Judges, Cabinet members, Ambassadors and other Presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation should be in the discretion of the President of the United States and unless some major, huge issue intervenes, it should be a rubber stamp hearing.

There is no reason to politicize a confirmation hearing unless the nominee is…oh, I don’t know, a pedophile?! It is the privilege of the President to nominate who he may and it is the duty of the Senate to confirm. Period. It is not an ideological debate. It is not a partisan debate. It is honoring the request of the President, which, Senator Byrd, is a long standing tradition just as your precious fillibuster is.

In other words, we’re heading for a major identity crisis in the Senate because these two sides won’t honor tradition. The Democrats won’t honor the nature of the confirmation vote and the Republicans won’t honor the fillibuster.

The next few days should be interesting.

Tagged as: politics