Free Congress Foundation's Notable News Now Excerpts from FCF Programming and Other FCF Projects May 16, 2001 The Free Congress Commentary Democrats Win at Game-Playing By Thomas L. Jipping Last week President Bush nominated 11 individuals to fill some of the many vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals. All are highly qualified and fit as closely as political circumstances allow the president's substantive standard: judges who will interpret, but not make, law. What's a leftist to do under these circumstances? For eight years, Senate Democrats and their left-wing interest group allies have shoveled coal into the confirmation train's boilers. Well, maybe coal harms the environment too much so maybe they use solar panels. Anyway, for eight years they chanted "confirm, confirm, confirm" as Clinton nominees rolled through the Senate. President Clinton in fact had a 374-1 confirmation run, even though he had a so-called "opposition" Senate for six of those eight years. So now it would seem a bit, oh, hypocritical to suddenly apply the confirmation brakes because a Republican is in the White House. They would have to explain all their past ranting about filling vacancies, especially since vacancies are higher now than when all the ranting went on. They would have to find some excuse for the obvious partisan politics, especially since they said for six years that partisan politics had no place in the confirmation process. So they come up with one gimmick after another, anything to throw a wrench in the works. Their latest gem: they did it first!! The current version of this stunt is the claim that Republicans denied confirmation to 167 Clinton judicial nominees. An eager liberal media lap up this dangling statistic and report it without any investigation, without any scrutiny, without a look at all. But as my dad used to say, liars figure and figures lie. What this figure hanging in mid-air is supposed to suggest is that Republicans could have confirmed all those nominees, but chose not to do so. That, in turn, suggests that nominations are all made at the beginning of each two-year Congress, in plenty of time to do all the background checks, hearings, questionnaires, investigations, and follow-ups that are now standard confirmation operating procedure. Not true. When the Congressional Research Service examined nominations that expired at the close of a two-year Congress without receiving a hearing, it excluded nominations made so late that they could not have been considered. Applying that standard knocks out at least eight nominations from the 106th Congress alone. Another problem with the 167 figure is that it double and triple counts individuals nominated in successive Congresses. A dozen of the nominations expiring at the close of the 106th Congress fall in this category and seven, more than half, were confirmed. So Senate Democrats are using as Exhibit A the charge that Republicans prevented individuals from being confirmed who are, in fact, serving as federal judges today. That's a word game worthy of Bill Clinton. The truth is that Republicans never pulled the overt, explicit, in-your-face, partisan obstruction stunts the Democrats are pulling today. Many conservatives urged them to do so, but they never did. Republicans never threatened filibusters - in fact, Republican leaders openly discouraged their colleagues from this approach. Republicans never applied issue-based litmus tests, threatening to deny confirmation to nominees failing to promise to rule the right way on those issues. Republicans never walked out of committee hearings to prevent votes on nominees. Democrats are playing more aggressive, and more partisan, political games than Republican ever did. So even if it were valid to say "they did it too", Democrats are still busted. And Democrats still have all their own words to somehow explain away, to pretend that by urging more confirmations they were actually saying the process should slow down. Stay tuned. Thomas L. Jipping is Vice-President for Legal Policy at the Free Congress Foundation. For media inquiries, contact Notra Trulock 202.546.3000 / [EMAIL PROTECTED] For other questions or comments, contact Angie Wheeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Coalition for Judicial Restraint To see the Coalition for Judicial Restraint weekly report contact John Nowacki at (e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Visit our website at http://www.FreeCongress.org
