San Diego Union Tribune

April 24, 2005

NATION
Pro-filibuster camp makes for strange bedfellows
Groups usually in opposition worry agendas would suffer

By Finlay Lewis
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE


WASHINGTON – It is an issue that unites gun-control proponents and gun owners, abortion-rights activists and anti-abortion lobbyists.

Groups normally at each other's throats have been galvanized to oppose Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in his threat to quash Democrats' ability to use the filibuster as a tactic to kill President Bush's judicial nominations.

At stake is a time-honored tactic of endless talking that has proved useful at different times to politicians of varied stripes eager to avoid being steamrollered by a Senate majority.

If Frist's power play succeeds, strategists for interest groups as diverse as organized labor and the National Right-to-Work Committee, an anti-union organization, say their agendas risk being obliterated, with dire consequences for the country.

"Is this Pandora's box or not?" wondered Stephen Hess, a veteran political analyst at the Brookings Institution. "It's very, very hard to look at this as not being precedent-setting or precedent-smashing. . . . This is just a wearing-down of the granite, the monument, the foundation."

For Frist and other Republican leaders, victory would mean having to garner only 51 votes from the 100-member Senate to approve Bush's nominees. As matters now stand, the GOP, with its 55-seat majority, has to corral 60 votes to end a filibuster and force a judgeship vote. In recent years, that procedural vote has become the effective threshold for approving many of Bush's judicial selections.

Democrats, backed by a diverse collection of interest groups, worry that Frist's move, if successful, will spell the eventual demise of the filibuster.

For more than 200 years, the Senate's tradition of tolerating lengthy debates has been used to advance a variety of causes, from protecting segregation to opposing the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I. In almost all cases, the filibustering senators have seen themselves as champions of a beleaguered minority or as principled guardians of the national interest.

Frist, a Tennessee Republican, and his supporters say the fears of their opponents are exaggerated and that the contemplated change in the Senate's rules would apply only to items on the president's agenda – mainly personnel appointments and nominations. Left untouched would be the right to utilize the filibuster in legislative battles. The change sought by Frist would still be momentous, which is why it has been dubbed the "nuclear option."

In retaliation, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has threatened to blow up the Senate – figuratively – if Frist wins the fight. Reid's arsenal includes several parliamentary procedures that would bring floor business to a standstill, making life miserable for Republicans, while Democrats would enjoy the flexibility of being able to attack at their convenience.

Reid's contingency planning is a measure of the stakes involved and of the struggle's emotional intensity.

While no timetable for the showdown has been set, winning the battle would clear the way for Bush to win Senate approval of 10 contested nominations to the federal bench currently in limbo because of a filibuster threat.

Ultimately, eliminating that obstacle would almost certainly expand Bush's freedom to pick ideological soul mates for eventual vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court, where several members are ailing, aged or both.

The abortion-rights movement is sounding the alarm because that could mean the imminent reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave women a constitutional right to abortions.

"It is crystal-clear that's what the president is trying to do," said David Seldin, a spokesman for NARAL Pro-Choice America, a leading abortion-rights organization. "It is absolutely clear this 'nuclear option' is explicitly designed to achieve that end. There is a direct line between the nuclear option and the end of Roe v. Wade."

Joining NARAL in opposition to Frist's maneuver is its bitter adversary in the abortion wars, the National Pro-Life Alliance.

In a letter to a Senate ally, the alliance writes, "There will come a day – perhaps as early as 2009 – when pro-lifers will be forced to rely on the Senate filibuster to save us from federally funded and congressionally sanctioned abortion on demand."

The alliance's concerns mirror those of other advocacy groups, which argue that a Frist victory in the tradition-bound Senate would ease the way for a future move to eliminate filibustering of general legislation, such as gun-control bills, environmental protection measures and proposals affecting collective bargaining.

Fueling the determination of Frist's supporters is their conviction that federal judges in recent decades have abused their trust by legislating from the bench to advance social, cultural and religious causes. The refusal of the courts to extend the life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died when her feeding tube was removed, has become emblematic of what conservatives see as an out-of-control judiciary.

C. Boyden Gray, a top strategist for the Frist forces, said the Democrats precipitated the current struggle by using the filibuster to circumvent the constitutional threshold of a simple majority for the Senate confirmation of presidential nominees. The tactic as applied to judicial nominees is a recent invention, Gray contended.

"We think they changed the rules," he said. "We're only trying to fix it."

Gray and others close to Frist say they are guardedly confident of winning the 51 votes that would be required to end judicial filibusters. Their adversaries say they are mistaken. In fact, the situation appears highly fluid, as several veteran Republican senators wrestle with the consequences of striking a potentially fatal blow at a cherished tradition that is central to the Senate's image of itself as a cautious, deliberative body.

"The old axiom 'What goes around comes around' applies fully here," said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. "There will come a day when the Republicans will greatly regret this, because they will be in the minority and 51 Democrats will be able to push through judges that the Republicans regard as wild liberals. So it's short-term gain for long-term pain."

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