Democrats to delay vote on Alito by one week

GOP girds for battle
Republicans say they’re ready to fight if Democrats try a partisan filibuster, including the so-called nuclear option, which would let the GOP ban judicial filibusters. “I will use all the tools I have to simply get an up-or-down vote on the floor of the Senate for the president’s judicial nominees,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said last month.

But experts said Democrats are not yet in a position to filibuster Alito, even if they wanted to.

To be successful, a filibuster would need almost all of the 44 Democrats behind it and certainly all of the Democratic leadership. But the Senate’s senior Democrat, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, has said several times on the Senate floor that he has seen no reason to filibuster Alito’s nomination. “There is not going to be any filibuster against Alito,” Byrd insisted in December in a heated December exchange with Frist.

Other Democrats have echoed that since Alito’s October nomination.

Gang of 14 starts to fragment
In addition, the “Gang of 14” — centrist Republicans and Democrats, including Byrd, who brokered a deal to end filibusters of nominees to lower courts and keep Frist from banning filibusters — has splintered, with at least two of the Republicans saying they would vote to ban filibusters if Democrats try one on Alito.

Frist needs a majority vote in the Senate to ban filibusters. If all 100 senators vote, Democrats would need 51 votes to stop Frist. None of the Republicans have said they would even consider opposing Alito.

To pull off a successful filibuster, Democrats need things to go their way both inside and outside the hearings, said Julian Zelizer, a Supreme Court expert at Boston University.

Inside, “Alito would have to not respond well, not in terms of answers he gives but how he responds to questions about abortion and ‘one man-one vote,”’ Zelizer said. “If he is too hostile, if he’s too confrontational, if he fails to convey the sense that he’s evolved on this issues since the 1980s, there is a chance that Democrats will see this as reason to filibuster.”

The Abramoff factor
Events outside the hearing will also have an influence, Zelizer said, especially the guilty pleas of Jack Abramoff, the once-powerful lobbyist who has agreed to testify in a political corruption investigation.

“If we start getting reports in the next week or so about Republican legislators who are going to be involved in investigations of money and politics and their ties to Abramoff, I think it will increase the willingness of the Democrats to be even tougher in the Alito hearings, sensing that the Republican leadership is in trouble,” Zelizer said.

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