Virtuoso role reversals mark filibuster struggle

WASHINGTON - With the battle over Democratic filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees about to escalate, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Sunday, "If what Democrats are doing is wrong today, it won’t be right for Republicans to do the same thing tomorrow."

But history shows that Republicans did something similar to the Democrats' filibusters five years ago.

In 1999 and 2000, before he became majority leader, Frist was one of the Republican senators blocking President Clinton’s nominee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Richard Paez.

Frist and others repeatedly prevented a vote on the Paez nomination. In 1999, Frist and 52 other Republicans voted against a motion to proceed to a vote on Paez.

Six months later, Frist voted against cutting off extended debate — a filibuster — on the nomination.

Then he voted for a motion to postpone a vote on the nomination.

And finally on March 9, 2000, four years after Clinton nominated Paez to the appeals court, Frist was on the losing end of a 59-39 vote on the nomination itself.

Leahy’s concern in 2000
Protesting the maneuvers by Republican senators, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told the Senate on March 9, 2000, “Whoever the next president might be, if it is a Republican president, do we start doing the same things to him the Republicans have done to President Clinton?”

We now know the answer to Leahy’s question: yes.

Leahy and other Democrats are doing to President Bush what the Republicans did to Clinton. Such delays “should not be done in judicial nominations,” Leahy said in 2000. “We should protect the integrity and the independence of our federal courts.”

“We had an intervening election after the (Paez) nomination was first made, and President Clinton won,” noted Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., on March 8, 2000. “It is indefensible to hold a nomination hostage for his entire second term. It defies the clear constitutional prerogatives of the duly elected president to choose nominees to the bench and the duty of the Senate to say yes or no.”

“I plead with my colleagues to move judges with alacrity, vote them up or down,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. during the Paez saga. “This delay makes a mockery of the Constitution.”

Leahy, Feingold, and Schumer voted to block votes on 10 of Bush’s judicial nominees in 2003 and 2004. Today Leahy, Feingold, and Schumer are playing the role Frist played in 2000.

And Frist, once an agent of obstruction, is moving to change the rule on filibustering nominees so that the Senate can, as Schumer said, “vote them up or down.”

“I don’t think it’s radical to ask senators to vote. I don’t think it’s radical to expect senators to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities,” Frist said Sunday at a rally organized by the Christian conservative group Family Research Council.

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