Sen Specter: Committee decisions should have no efffect on Senate votes

Monday, April 25, 2005
The GOP Filibuster Snowball


From an AP wire story on U.N. Ambassador John Bolton's nomination:

"I think the best policy is to have his nomination come to the full Senate, not decided by a committee because the Constitution says that advice and consent are the province of the Senate itself," said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., on CNN's "Late Edition."

So now the Senate Judicial Committee chairman is on the record saying that what committees decide about a nominee should have no effect on whether the nomination receives a vote from the full Senate. I will give Chairman Specter credit for being logically consistent.

Why have Senate committees and hearings if the committees vote means nothing? The fact is that the committee hearings do and should continue to mean something. I hope the Democrats pick this up and insist on an amendment that ties the termination of the filibuster to the end of nominations going through the committee vetting process. You can't justify one without the other and it's time to call the GOP's bluff.

It's already established Supreme Court precedent that the Senate may delegate its constitutional authority to a Senate committee or subcommittee. See, Nixon v. United States, 506 U.S. 224, 113 S.Ct. 732 (1993). So, this is yet again, another GOP misrepresentation on the issue. The U.S. Constitution does not mandate that each and every nominee receive a vote from the full Senate. If that was so, does that mean that the subsequent appointments made as a result of GOP's success in denying Clinton nominees are invalid and that the Clinton appointees denied a floor vote or, as in some cases, even a hearing, should be considered duly appointed?

To go with the GOP view, then anything the Ethics Committees have done is unconstitutional. Does this mean that Jim Traficant was illegally removed from office? The U.S. Supreme Court, in Nixon, said no. Therefore, Specter's constitutional interpretation on political appointments is misguided.

http://modern-esquire.blogspot.com/2005/04/gop-filibuster-snowball.html

always looking for a way to back out of taking responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Absolutely typical.

Funny how the republicans didn't have a problem with this when it came to Clintons nominees...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/25/opinion/main683182.shtml
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All this changed in 1996. Rather than openly challenge President Clinton's nominees on the floor, Republicans decided to deny them Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Between 1996 and 2000, 20 of Bill Clinton's appeals-court nominees were denied hearings, including Elena Kagan, now dean of the Harvard Law School, and many other women and minorities. In 1999, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings for almost six months on any of 16 circuit-court and 31 district-court nominations Clinton had sent up. Three appeals-court nominees who did manage to obtain a hearing in Clinton's second term were denied a committee vote, including Allen R. Snyder, a distinguished Washington lawyer, Clinton White House aide, and former Rehnquist law clerk, who drew lavish praise at his hearing -- but never got a committee vote. Some 45 district-court nominees were also denied hearings, and two more were afforded hearings but not a committee vote.

Even votes that did occur were often delayed for months and even years. In late 1999, New Hampshire Republican Bob Smith blocked a vote on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Richard Paez for months by putting an anonymous hold on the nomination. When Majority Leader Trent Lott could no longer preserve the hold, Smith and 13 other Republicans tried to mount a filibuster against the vote, but cloture was voted and Paez easily confirmed. It had been over four years since his nomination.

When his tactics on the Paez and Marsha Berzon nominations (Berzon was filibustered along with Paez, more than two years after her nomination) were challenged, Smith responded with an impassioned floor speech in defense of the judicial filibuster: "Don't pontificate on the floor of the Senate and tell me that somehow I am violating the Constitution of the United States of America by blocking a judge or filibustering a judge that I don't think deserves to be on the circuit court ... . That is my responsibility. That is my advice and consent role, and I intend to exercise it."

The public spectacle that occurred the one time that Republicans did wait for a floor vote to kill a nomination confirmed the untenability of their strategy when openly exposed. Ronnie White, an African American judge from Missouri, was nominated for a district judgeship. He was opposed by then-Senator John Ashcroft, who was hunting for a re-election campaign issue; to support Ashcroft, Republicans voted in lockstep against the nomination. Afterward, some of them claimed they hadn't known White was African American. After the embarrassing fight, one Republican staff member acknowledged that "t's just better to kill them in committee."

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