This site is not a wholly-owned or rented subsidiary of AEI (heaven forbid), but Mr. Orenstein has written yet another blistering rebuttal of the Senate Republicans' and their allies' claims about the filibuster.
Now let us take up the assertion that we have had a two-century-plus tradition of giving presidents up-or-down votes on their judicial nominations. What are these people smoking? For more than 200 years, hundreds of judicial nominees at all levels had their nominations deep-sixed, buried, killed or asphyxiated by the Senate, either by one individual, a committee or a small group of Senators, before the nominations ever got anywhere near the floor. To be sure, most were not filibustered in the "Mr. Smith" sense, or in the modern and direct version. These judicial nominees were stabbed in the back, not in the chest.[snip]
Of the 154 nominations to the Supreme Court between 1789 and 2002, 34 were not confirmed. Of these, 11 were rejected by a vote of the full Senate. The remaining 23 were postponed, referred to a committee from which they never emerged, reported from committee but not acted on, or, in a few cases, withdrawn by the president when the going got tough. At least seven nominations were killed because of objections by home-state Senators. Five others were reported to the Judiciary Committee (which was created in 1816) and never made it out.
The trouble is, the Senate Republicans and their acolytes have gotten to the stage where facts are meaningless partisan bludgeons used against the chosen judicial nominees by the mean minority party. What are these people smoking, indeed.
Once again, via Tapped.
Posted by Linkmeister at May 18, 2005 02:42 PM