Same story, different nominees

Kay Daly

Imagine you have a dream to become an attorney. You work impossibly long hours to achieve success in college and law school, reaching the top of your class. On the law review, you spend what little free time you have crafting articles on a variety of issues, not knowing that an obscure footnote could come back to haunt you twenty years later.



Saddled with student loan debt, you clerk for a judge for long hours and little pay. You work 80-hour work weeks in a variety of legal jobs until finally, you are at the top of your profession and regularly argue cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, at the peak of your career, the President of the United States bestows the ultimate honor upon your work by nominating you for a seat on the federal bench.



For the next several years of your life, you get the privilege of opening up the newspaper every morning only to read the latest lie written about you. The added bonus is that you are not allowed to respond in any way. The only time you can defend your record is if it happens to arise at your nomination hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee.



If and when you finally get a hearing, the grandstanding starts almost right away. For several hours, you and your family will have the privilege of hearing long-winded Senators list your sins against humanity. Strangely, the charges asserted and the language used to describe them sound almost identical to the lengthy missives launched by an alphabet soup of leftist organizations and echoed by their cohorts in the press.



Your answers at the hearing are met with sneering skepticism, scattered snickering throughout the hearing room by those leftist organizations and their multitude of minions and snide questions that question your judgment, your character, your religious beliefs, your affiliations, your writings, client list and anything else that strikes their fancy. No matter what answer you give, it won’t satisfy either the liberal groups or their compatriots on the Judiciary Committee.



Although you have filled out dozens of pages of forms and questionnaires and subjected your life and everyone in it to the FBI, the Justice Department, the White House, the Senate Judiciary Committee and everyone in between, you will still leave the hearing room with yet more questions from Senators and their friends in the liberal organizations determined to sink your nomination.



The ugly truth of the matter is that once you are targeted either because your extraordinary resume and legal talents could put you on a short list for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination or simply because the leftists believe they can score cheap political points off of making you an example, you have earned a one-way ticket to a filibuster.



With slight adjustments, this story has been the same for every obstructed nominee. It is a sad state of affairs that these extraordinary lawyers and judges who have been nominated and filibustered will more likely be known for being filibustered than their extraordinary careers. The question becomes, who would want to subject a reputation for decades of hard work and accomplishment to this kind of abuse and destruction?



The lawyers who are on the track to become federal judges are “lawyers’ lawyers” not political hacks. To drop a federal judicial nominee into a political battlefield is akin to making an accountant into a bullfighter. Yet, because the process has devolved into political purgatory because of a tyrannical minority in the U.S. Senate that insists upon an ideological litmus test, potential judicial nominees might think twice before subjecting themselves and their families to this obscene abuse.



Each of the filibustered nominees would have been approved by a simple majority vote but for the new supermajority vote requirement courtesy of Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Pat Leahy. Kennedy, et.al. demand a supermajority vote for those nominees they label “outside of the mainstream.” In other words, nominees who don’t agree with their activist agenda for the courts and happen to be potential candidates for the short list for the U.S. Supreme Court, will be called every disparaging name possible.



Earlier this month,, the games began again in earnest in the Senate Judiciary Committee with the new chairman, Arlen Specter, who mistakenly believes that putting these nominees back in the lions’ den for another round of hearings may sooth the opposition. Liberal groups predictably sent out their memos about their targets, Terrence Boyle and William Myers and the questioning in the hearings coincidentally echoed their complaints about Boyle on civil rights issues and Myers on environmental cases.



Chairman Specter will hopefully quickly realize that the olive branch he offers his leftist colleagues on the committee will be put through a wood chipper and that multiple hearings for the President’s renominated judicial nominees are an exercise in futility.



The consequences of the obstruction for the nominees specifically and the federal judiciary as a whole are disastrous. Reforming the Senate rules to return to the constitutional option of a fair and simple up or down vote for all nominees is absolutely necessary to preserve the Constitution. If filibuster reform is not enacted, the story recounted above will continue with progressively worse results.

###

Kay Daly is president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary and a recipient of the prestigious Ronald Reagan Award from American Conservative Union. She has over fifteen years of experience in corporate, political, grassroots and crisis communications, marketing and policy research, and issues management. She is a published columnist having appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investors Business Daily, National Review Online, Worldnetdaily.com, Opeds.com, Townhall.com, and many others.

KRdaly@aol.com