Greatest Democratic Judicial Hits What Republicans learned from Harry Reid and Barack Obama.

Posted By on February 21st, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/greatest-democratic-judicial-hits-1455925914

Senate Democrats haven’t made much progress shaming Republicans into yielding on President Obama’s upcoming Supreme Court nominee, and no wonder. As much as they’re trying, they can’t erase their own abusive history of double and sometimes triple standards in confirmation politics.

Earlier this week we chronicled New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s faked alibi for his categorical 2007 demand that Democrats reject any George W. Bush nominee if a vacancy had emerged in his last 18 months in office. But there is so much more to recall:

• When Democrats ran the Senate from June 2001 to January 2003, they denied even a hearing before the Judiciary Committee to 32 of Mr. Bush’s nominees. When Republicans regained a 51-49 majority in the next Congress, Democrats broke the then-longstanding Senate norm of granting nominees an up-or-down vote. Before 2003, only one judicial nominee had been blocked with a filibuster, and that was the bipartisan 1968 rebellion against promoting the ethically challenged Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice.

Democrats applied the higher 60-vote standard to a rainbow coalition of Bush nominees, judging them not by traditional measures like experience or temperament or even “diversity.” They simply didn’t like their politics.

The targets included Priscilla Owen (a woman), Janice Rogers Brown (a black woman) and Miguel Estrada (a Hispanic). The 28-month Estrada filibuster was especially egregious because Democrats feared the smart young attorney’s ethnic background might make him formidable Supreme Court material if he served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

• When Mr. Bush nominated Samuel Alito to the High Court in 2005, Democrats attempted to give him the same treatment. Some 25 Senators voted to support a filibuster, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Pat Leahy and Mr. Schumer. READ MORE AT SITE

 

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