The GOP Senate Slumber Party

[yesthattom]

Sen. Pat Leahy of VT wore a T-shirt that read: "We confirmed 98 percent of Bush's judges, and all we got was this lousy T-shirt." From the DLC web site:

The GOP Senate Slumber Party

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Starting at 6 p.m. last night, Republicans began a 30-hour, round-the-clock debate aimed at drawing attention to alleged Democratic obstructionism on the confirmation of four Bush judicial nominees.

It's a very peculiar tactic: a "reverse filibuster" aimed at tying up the World's Greatest Deliberative Body until Democrats allow votes on the four highly controversial conservative nominees for federal judgeships.

As Senate staffers prepared cots and coffee urns for the GOP gab-a-thon, all sorts of strange political theater broke out. Republicans began mustering for the ordeal in the Senate's Strom Thurmond Room, an appropriate venue given the late South Carolinian's longstanding record for the lengthiest personal filibuster (more than 24 hours, aimed at blocking civil rights legislation in 1957). On the Democratic side, ranking Judiciary Committee member Sen. Pat Leahy of VT wore a T-shirt that read: "We confirmed 98 percent of Bush's judges, and all we got was this lousy T-shirt."

Leahy's jibe nicely addresses the odd nature of all the Republican huffing and puffing about Democratic "obstructionism." The Senate has approved 168 Bush appointees so far, and has refused lifetime appointments for four who have drawn serious criticism on grounds of their very conservative views on civil rights and other key constitutional issues. Through Bush's first two years, moreover, Democrats compiled a higher support level for Bush's judicial appointments than Republicans provided for Bill Clinton's nominees, who were generally less controversial to begin with.

So what's the big deal, and why should the U.S. Senate devote 30 straight hours to this issue? Who's really paying attention to the fate of these four judges?

Democrats on the record, and Republicans off the record, agree that this burning of the midnight oil really represents the burning of incense at the altar of the GOP's right-wing base. After all, a transformed federal judiciary -- especially one that may someday overturn Roe v. Wade and criminalize abortion -- is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for many of the Right's most loyal foot soldiers, and the not-so-secret foundation of their alliance to George W. Bush. The current effort to ram four hyper-conservative judges down the throats of Senate Democrats is a dress rehearsal for the real deal -- a battle over Supreme Court appointments -- that will occur if Bush wins a second term. The message Senate Republicans are sending to conservative activists this week is that they are in training for that epochal battle.

So maybe the GOP's Senate Slumber Party looks silly, but the longer-range fight for control of the federal judiciary -- and the power to shape or repeal constitutional rights -- is a deadly serious business. Republican complaints about the minority party exercising its procedural prerogatives to hold up just four of 172 judicial nominees seem ludicrous at the very time that the majority party is shutting Democrats out of key House-Senate deliberations on important national issues such as Medicare and energy policy.

An appeal for comity might be taken more seriously if Republicans were even-handed in its application. This is comedy, not an appeal for comity.