The deal cut by 14 senators to head off the “nuclear option” in the fight over Bush’s judicial nominations has been hailed as if it brought peace in our time. John McCain is celebrated as the new leader of the Senate. Joe Lieberman says getting deals like this done are why he came to the Senate. Editorialists hail the triumph of the center and paint it as a loss for the fundamentalist right.
Say what? Take a close look at this deal. It preserved the right of the Democratic minority to filibuster. But the filibuster is a tool of the embattled, not a centerpiece of progress. Preserving the filibuster just means that the minority can live to fight again. That’s fine, but it isn’t much.
In exchange, Democrats agreed to go forward without filibuster with three of the worst Bush nominees n Priscilla R. Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and William H. Pryor Jr. And they agreed not to use the filibuster except in “extraordinary” circumstances n which presumably means if Bush nominates a true Neanderthal to the Supreme Court.
Republicans agreed not to vote for the nuclear option, unless Democrats filibuster a judicial nominee. If then, they are free to go nuclear.
The whole point of using the filibuster wasn’t to prove its worth but to stop truly reactionary activist judges from being confirmed to the bench. These nominees were held up because they are zealots, activists inclined to use their position on the bench to enforce their very right-wing social and economic views.
Priscilla Owen has been in the pocket of corporations and against consumers and workers in her tenure on the Texas bench. She was so extreme in pushing her own views that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then a colleague on the bench, denounced her “unconscionable act of judicial activism.”
Janice Rogers Brown is an advocate for reversing the entire jurisprudence of the Civil Rights era and the New Deal. She describes the New Deal as the “triumph of our Socialist revolution.”
Pryor is famous for reviving states rights doctrines to limit congressional protection of civil rights, and remove constitutional protection of gay rights or women’s right to reproductive freedom.
These are judges who want to outlaw affirmative action, ban abortion, roll back worker rights, and limit the ability of Congress to regulate corporations.
The so called “moderate” deal let three truly reactionary nominees be confirmed for a lifetime appointment to the federal appeals courts. But why make this deal? If Frist had the votes to pull the nuclear trigger, he could have gotten the judges confirmed. If he didn’t have the votes, they would have been stopped.
This was a bad deal.