President Bush has refused to give up the fight to seat qualified jurists on the Bench despite the Democrats' strenuous efforts to keep them off. Daring the Democrats to employ their obstructionist tactics in this session as they have in the past, the president has resubmitted the names of twenty of thirty four candidates who were filibustered by the Democrats in recent sessions of Congress:
The Democrats' ability to stall certain White House picks for the federal bench was one of the most contentious issues of Bush's first term. During the past two years, despite the GOP majority in the Senate, Democrats used filibusters to prevent final votes from occurring on 10 of 34 of Bush's nominees to federal appeals courts.
"The president nominated highly qualified individuals to the federal courts during his first term, but the Senate failed to vote on many nominations," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in a statement the White House issued Thursday. "Unfortunately, this only exacerbates the issue of judicial vacancies, compounds the backlog of cases and delays timely justice for the American people."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist called for quick action and issued a statement that pressured Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., to support the president's nominees. Specter, a moderate Republican, recently won the backing of Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans to be their new chairman despite his statement that judges who oppose abortion would have a difficult time gaining Senate confirmation, given the opposition from Democrats.
"The president has decided to re-nominate many highly qualified and capable individuals to serve as federal judges," Frist said. "I look forward to working with Sen. Specter, other Judiciary Committee members and my colleagues to ensure quick action and up and down votes on these judicial nominees."
Democrats reacted with irritation. "I was extremely disappointed to learn today that the president intends to begin the new Congress by resubmitting extremist judicial nominees," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in a statement. "Last Congress, Senate Democrats worked with the president to approve 204 judicial nominees, rejecting only 10 of the most extreme."
By "extreme", Senator Reid means that these judges would likely not rule as he would want them to. They may be squarely in the mainstream of public opinion but since their decisions may offend Senate liberals they are placed out on the "fringe" of our political culture.
In fact, however, these are men and women committed to interpreting the constitution and the law according to what it says and not according to the political fashion of the times, and that's what the Left finds so troublesome. Unable to get their agenda enacted through the legislature, the Left has over the last four decades resorted more and more frequently to the courts to impose their ideological preferences on the rest of society. A conservative court would jeopardize this strategy, which has worked so effectively for the Left, and must, in their view, be prevented at all costs.
Tom Daschle led the filibuster of judical nominees over the last four years and paid for it on November 2nd. There are a number of Senate Democrats from states that went strongly for Bush upon whom the lesson was not lost. They will be torn between their own political futures and blocking the president's appointments. George Bush, like "Dirty Harry", is telling the obstructionists to "Go ahead. Make my day."