Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
12/6/2011
Senate Republicans on Tuesday filibustered one of President Obama’s appellate court nominees, ending a six-year truce and reigniting one of the bitterest recurring battles on Capitol Hill.
The 54-45 vote, almost entirely along partisan lines, blocked former New York Solicitor-General Caitlin Joan Halligan from getting a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and put the final nail in the coffin of the 2005 agreement by the so-called “Gang of 14” that headed off a partisan war over Republican plans to use the “nuclear option” to bar such filibusters altogether.
Tuesday’s vote returns the state of affairs to 2003, when Democrats first legitimized judicial filibusters by blocking President Bush’s nomination of Miguel Estrada to the same appeals court.
“We shouldn’t be putting activists on the bench,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican. “We should be putting people on the bench who are committed to an evenhanded interpretation of the law, so everyone who walks into a courtroom knows he or she will have a fair shake. In my view, Ms. Halligan is not such a nominee.”
Ms. Halligan is the second of Mr. Obama’s judicial nominees to be filibustered but the first to fall purely to Republican opposition and the first to be blocked chiefly on the grounds of ideology without any issues of judicial temperament being raised.
Mr. McConnell said that on cases involving gun rights and terrorism, she chose to file legal briefs that ignored previously settled law and to pursue what, in the gun rights case, a New York court called a “legally inappropriate” theory…
…Mr. Obama, who joined filibusters against many of Mr. Bush’s judges during his time in the Senate, said he was “deeply disappointed” in Tuesday’s vote…
…Tuesday’s vote broke down almost exclusively along party lines, with only Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, deviating to vote with Democrats. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican, voted “present.”…
Read the entire article at The Washington Times.
Update: Judging President Obama’s Nominees by Senator Obama’s Standard
…President Obama is re-writing Senate history; today’s vote did not “lower the bar.” There is no rule that judicial nomination filibusters require “extraordinary circumstances.” While it’s true that the Bush-era “Gang of 14” agreement employed that standard for filibusters then pending, that agreement expired, by its own express deadline, in 2006…
…But even setting the president’s historical fiction aside, his statement today is a laughable departure from his own (short) record as a senator. Even when the Gang of 14 agreement was in effect, he opposed cloture on at least one (ultimately successful) nomination: Janice Rogers Brown…
His record on the Brown nomination is particularly illustrative.
