Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court has been approved by a straight party-line vote and it’s now on it’s way to the full Senate:
WASHINGTON (AP) – As the Senate begins its final debate on Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the conservative jurist already has won enough commitments from senators to become the nation’s 110th justice and likely tilt the high court to the right.
Senators were to consider Alito as the replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on Wednesday with an eye toward getting him on the Supreme Court before President Bush’s State of the Union speech Jan. 31.
As of late Tuesday, the federal appeals court judge had enough vote commitments for confirmation – a simple majority in the 100-member Senate – with 50 Senate Republicans plus Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska publicly saying through their representatives, in interviews with The Associated Press or in news releases that they would vote for him.
One Republican, Sen. Craig Thomas of Wyoming, made his decision after meeting with Alito in his Senate office on Tuesday. “His judicial experience is second to none and I’m confident he will do an excellent job handling his constitutional responsibility,” Thomas said.
Five Republicans, 23 Democrats and independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont were still publicly undecided or refused to say how they would vote on Alito’s nomination. The nominee was meeting with two of the undecided Democrats, Sens. Patty Murray and Jay Rockefeller, on Wednesday in hopes of gaining their votes.
With Alito’s ultimate confirmation assured, both Republicans and Democrats were preparing to use him as a campaign issue. Republicans said the Democratic filibuster of lower-court judges helped them defeat the re-election bid of former Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota two years ago.
Democrats, as they did during contentious Judiciary Committee hearings, could use the next few days on Alito’s confirmation to continue the debate over the extent of presidential powers. Issues such as the Bush administration’s treatment of terror suspects and its domestic spying program are likely to come before the Supreme Court.
I heard an interview with former DNC chairman Ed Rendell yesterday who took his fellow-Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to task for their extreme politicization of the confirmation process: if the candidate has the academic, personal, and professional qualifications for the job he or she should be confirmed. I agree.
If Democrats attempt to filibuster the nomination it will be wrong, they’re likely to fail, it’s likely that Senate rules will be changed to prevent the tactic, and, what’s worse, it will result in a strategic loss. They may have made points with their donors but they have not covered themselves in glory and, by failing to make their personal and professional indictments of Alito’s qualifications stick, they made the case that opposing a candidate solely on ideological grounds is acceptable.
That’s not an argument that will bring success to Democrats. If Republicans accept that case, no future Democratic president is ever likely to get a Supreme Court nomination confirmed.
I guess I’m naive and old-fashioned. I really believe that the country is more than just warring factions. I really believe in “E Pluribus Unum”. And I believe that some deference is owed to qualified candidates a president may present to the Senate for confirmation.
As Lindsay Graham put it, what did they expect?
UPDATE: As was to have been expected, Rendell is being taken to task for his perfidy.
A big chunk of the Democrat party does not consider George W. Bush to have been LEGITIMATELY elected, and as such his judicial nominations are not due conventional deference regarding ideology. One wonders how Republican Senators would have responded to the Ginsburg nomination had Clinton lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College vote only after prolonged recounts and court interventions. (I am not defending the behavior, just trying to explain it a bit.)
That’s an unfounded position: no legal remedy sought by Gore/Lieberman would have resulted in their victory. That’s been the determination of The New York Times, Time magazine, and every study that I know of that’s been commissioned on the subject.
And we don’t have to wonder what Republicans would have done. Clinton lost the popular vote. As is true of most Democratic presidents of the 20th century Clinton won with a plurality of the popular vote but not with the majority. You don’t have to take my word for it—look it up.
What Republicans did was the right thing, as Democrat Ed Rendell affirmed.
Did I mention that I’m a Democrat? But I’m an American first and the kind of partisanship we’re seeing does not contribute to the strength of the Republic. Or the strength of the Democratic Party as I tried to indicate in my post.
The original organization of the nation’s governance was specifically designed to cut across factionalism, so that enduring groups of interests would not form in the way they did in Europe, leading to endless internecine warfare. And this worked: we did in fact manage the task, which is why we haven’t ended up, until recently, with Europe’s political brittleness.
I’m not certain where the changes arose from, but it has been apparent since the 1960s at least that we now have formal, institutional factions for whom winning is everything. Worse yet, at least in the case of blacks, there is a racial, and thus unchangeable without rejecting the whole premise of factionalism, political faction. We need to reorganize the system to cut across these factions, and I think that the best way to do it would be to reorganize Congress, with two reforms.
The first would be to create a formal process for setting election districts that would not be based purely on the whim of the state legislators. This would help to break the lock on office based on census enjoyed by political parties today, leading to more representative governance in the House.
For the Senate, I would either return their selection to the state legislators, or would have them selected by a statewide electoral college of some kind, with complete freedom of choice, perhaps by county commissioners. The idea in either case is to make the election of Senators indirect, so that they become less dependent on party and more thus more independent. This would lead to a less partisan Senate, as used to be the case.
But given the known consequences of factionalism, we are going to have to reform somehow to break the permanent factions we’ve developed, or we will suffer those consequences in political vituperation, internal semi-warfare, and general loss of national identity in favor of factional identity. Indeed, we are already seeing many of these consequences.
I have a somewhat different list of electoral reforms which I believe would have a similar effect at least by shaking up the current power structure. The first would require a constitutional amendment (as would your reforms), the second would not.
I believe that we should amend the Constitution to require that the Congress divide any state that reaches a defined threshold population (my preference: 10 million) into two states with some border rules as well e.g. no state wholly enclosed by another, leave counties intact, a line drawn from one point to any other point in the state should pass through no other state, etc. Each state would have two Senators, its own Congressional delegation, etc.
Second, I think we should fix the maximum population of a single Congressional district and expand the number of districts accordingly. My preference would be 60,000 but 100,000 would be acceptable. The main objection to this is that it would be cumbersome. Our legislative system is supposed to be cumbersome.
I believe that a finer division of Congressional districts would inevitably break the two party system into a multi-party system which seems to me to be an obvious necessity in a country as large and diverse as ours.