Let's Make a (Bad) Deal

Ben Johnson in Front Page Magazine agrees Senate Republicans picked the wrong door:

Based on [the Democrats'], we can assume "extraordinary circumstances" to exist whenever:

• A nominee is a conservative Southerner (shades of Clement Haynsworth);



• Refuses to turn over secret government documents; or



• Is opposed by organized racists, Labor’s socialist fringe, and other über-leftists.

Seven Republicans granted all this to the Left in exchange for a vote on 30 percent of the president’s original judicial nominees and an opaque promise of good behavior. They also left President Bush’s remaining nominees – including Arab-American jurist Henry Saad – to their opponents’ tender mercies.

The Wall Street Journal calls it Senatorial self-preservation:

This ballyhooed "compromise" is all about saving the Senators themselves, not the Constitution. Its main point is to shield the group of 14 from the consequences of having to cast difficult, public votes in a filibuster showdown. Thus they split the baby on the most pressing nominees, giving three of them a vote while rejecting two others on what seem to be entirely arbitrary grounds, so Members of both parties can claim victory. Far better to cashier nominees as a bipartisan phalanx, rather than face up to their individual "advice and consent" responsibilities. . . .

And it's cynicism squared in the case of the three nominees who will now finally be confirmed. Yesterday, 81 Senators voted to give Priscilla Owen a vote on the floor, after four years of Democratic filibusters. Apparently she isn't such a grave "extremist" threat after all. The same also applies to Janice Rogers Brown (22 months in the dock) and Bill Pryor (25 months). Monday's deal exposes the long Democratic campaign against them as "extremists" as nothing more than a political sop to People for the American Way and their ilk.