Democrats driving for 60 Senate seats

Seeing a silver lining in an ever-darkening cloud for the GOP, former Republican Senate aide Manuel Miranda said, “A filibuster-proof Senate may result in the biggest revitalization of the conservative movement and usher in a new generation of Republican Party operatives.”

Miranda heads an advocacy group that helped rally support for President Bush’s Supreme Court nominees Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

A 60-seat Senate majority “may also lead to some of the most divisive partisanship since the mid-1800s,” Miranda predicted. 

Struggle over Bush nominees
He recalled that when Democrats were in the minority from 2001 to 2005, they used the filibuster to block votes on several of Bush’s right-leaning judicial nominees, including Janice Rogers Brown and Miguel Estrada.

A bipartisan group of 14 senators, including Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, but not Obama, ultimately struck a deal whereby Brown and two other Bush nominees were confirmed.

The 14 senators pledged to not resort to filibusters of judicial nominees unless there were “extraordinary circumstances,” a term left undefined.

“The (Obama) judicial nominees that will rally Republicans will be those who had something to do with the Democrat obstructions of 2002-2005," Miranda said. "Chief among these is Cass Sunstein, who fueled the opposition to Miguel Estrada and many others.”

Sunstein is an Obama ally, a prolific author and a professor of law at Harvard Law School.

“Among plausible Obama Supreme Court nominees, the worst nightmare for conservatives is 2nd Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor,” said Curt Levey, the executive director of The Committee for Justice.

Is it the apocalypse for conservatives?
But Levey expressed skepticism about what appeared to be a conservative apocalyptic vision of a judiciary picked by Obama.

“Once the nominees are sent up to the Senate, I'm not sure 60 Democrats is any sort of magic number,” Levey said. “One, Republican senators have no history of filibustering Democratic judicial nominees. Two, Democratic gains in the Senate in November will mean an increased number of red and purple state Democrats, who will have to be wary of the political consequences back home if they support the confirmation of wild-eyed judicial activists to the federal bench.”

“In the end, nothing, including a Republican majority in the Senate, will stop a President Obama from pushing the federal courts in the direction of liberal judicial activism,” he said. “But holding down the number of Democratic gains in the Senate will mean that the courts' lurch to the left will be less extreme.”

Schumer played down the electoral significance of the judicial nominees issue. “Judicial nominations affect the base of each party and don’t affect swing voters in the election. Obviously we would want a more mainstream Supreme Court,” he said.

Schumer voted against the Roberts and Alito nominations and later expressed remorse that Senate Democrats had not used a filibuster to block a vote on Alito. He also led the successful effort to block a vote on Estrada.

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