The Senate Fillibuster

[Penn]

Did anyone view the Senate proceedings last eve about 9:00pm?

The Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch(R), literally TORE the liberal left Senators a NEW ONE!!

Calling the lefts' requirement to pore over Judicial Candidate Estrada's internal memos and legal briefs a "fishing expedition", and decrying the "phony" claims being made by these senators ie., Schumer, Clinton, Leahy, etc.

I can't recall seeing Sen. Hatch that upset since the Thomas hearings.

But he was last night. Several times Dem Senators would ask him to yield for a question or point of order; each time Sen. Hatch refuted their questions with data he had - which blew the Democraps right out of the water!

I thought it was riveting to see the Senator from Utah fight for the vote to approve candidate Estrada.

 

[demsformd]

Funny, I was going to start a thread on this issue too.

Ok, here is where I come from concerning judicial nominations. The decision on whether not to approve them cannot be solely based on the merit of their intelligence or anything such as that. If one reaches that level, the nominee is clearly with merit and a high level of intelligence. Thus, the criteria that I think must be used to approve a judicial nomination is their opinion of court precedents and legal issues. Estrada is a clearly a far right-wing nomination and if he were to be a member on the DC Court, its balance would be tipped even further to the right and even further from the mainstream. It is immensely troubling as well that the nominee will not answer questions about the issue when Democratic senators ask them. I can only conclude that his silence proves that he is a stealth ultraconservative nominee.

Also, why are the Republicans so upset over this? The procedures that are being used to block Estrada were the same ones that the Republicans used during their six years in control of the Senate chamber. Their record of confirming Clinton's nominees was deplorable and those refusals to act were not because the nominees held no merit. No, it was because they were pro-choice, pro-civil rights, and pro-environment. Estrada is a nominee to the seven-member 2nd Circuit, which is in DC. He is not being nominated to fill a vacancy but to increase the number of members on the board for that circuit. Clinton proposed doing this during his term but the Republican senators rejected it because we supposedly did not need another judge on the bench for the 2nd Circuit. Yet once the conservative President Bush comes into office, the 2nd Circuit needs more members. This is hypocrisy at its best but I understand it because nomination fights are inherently political. I just wish that the Republicans would understand that.

Now it is our turn to block conservative nominees and we are in an even more difficult bind due to our minority status in the Senate. But Estrada will be fought, and hopefully stopped in his tracks.

 

[Penn]

Did you actually watch the fillibuster in progess?

Originally posted by demsformd
Funny, I was going to start a thread on this issue too.
Estrada is a clearly a far right-wing nomination and if he were to be a member on the DC Court, its balance would be tipped even further to the right and even further from the mainstream. It is immensely troubling as well that the nominee will not answer questions about the issue when Democratic senators ask them.


Now it is our turn to block conservative nominees and we are in an even more difficult bind due to our minority status in the Senate. But Estrada will be fought, and hopefully stopped in his tracks.

Dems, if you didn't see the Senate hearing, - Sen. Hatch refuted every single solitary claim you just regurgitated from the aforementioned Senators on the left.
Estrada was asked over one hunderd and twenty(120) questions by your democratic pals! The average is 30 questions.

So do not tell me he was not adequately examined. What they most assuredlly wanted him to give up was how he would adjudicate settled law cases - Read: Roe vs Wade, Affirmative Action, etc.

They kept at him to try to get him to describe his feelings for sitting Supreme Court judges, ie., what did he think about their judicial temperment, and how would he as a prospective judge come down on certain cases they in the Supreme Court had already decided. That is BS. It is unethical to ask a nominee those kinds of questions, Sen. Hatch argued.

Lastly, the Senators on the left want Estrada to give up internal memos, briefs filed with the Solicitor General to Supreme Court' and other personal drafts to these briefs.

Dem, these papers were turned over to the Department of Justice as the law requires, and are now the property of that department. Estrada no longer owns those documents and cannot turn them over to the Senators on the left for their perusal. It's not his choice.

This IS a phony fishing expedition!

Furthermore, several, and I mean several LIBERAL Newspapers ran editorials all across the country in the last 3 or 4 days decrying the Democratic fillibuster over this nominee.

Most of them came right out and said: If the Democratic Senators choose to keep this tactic up, they will suffer heavily in the polls, come 2004.

 

[demsformd]

Ok I hear you brother. That is why a recent poll shows Bush only leading a Democratic challenger by 5 percentage points. How much do confirmation battles have to do in campaigns? Little, if anything. The only way that you can use them effectively is to energize the base of your party. What about the way Republicans treated Democratic nominees? Why is their a feeling that any nominee should be confirmed all of a sudden? Look, until conservatives agree to follow the system that they describe concerning merit when there are liberals appointed will I believe that my party is the wrong-doer here. You did the exact same thing to liberal nominations for six years.