All-night filibuster targets balky Demos

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, will stage a great parliamentary show tonight for insomniacs.

They will debate all night tonight and all day Thursday — for 30 hours straight beginning at 4 p.m. Mountain time — about how they say Democrats are unfairly blocking pro-life nominees (many of whom are minorities) to federal appeals courts.

After the talk-a-thon, they plan votes seeking to end blocks on three such nominees, and maybe on a rule change that would prevent filibusters against all judicial nominees in the future. But no one really expects any of those to pass.

This long debate is not about changing the minds of other senators. It is about seeking the attention of the public — with an all-night stunt — and maybe creating an issue for next year's elections.

Hatch warned it was coming last week. He also warns that the political equivalent of nuclear war may be on the horizon in the Senate, where traditionally cooler heads have prevailed and such blood-sport politics are left to the House. No more.

The ill will comes because the Senate has been taken over by a bunch of filibusterers. The word "filibuster," or using long talks or parliamentary moves to block legislation or confirmations, comes from a Dutch word for "pirate." So one could say the Senate has been taken over by a bunch of pirates.

Until this year, no appeals court nominee had ever been filibustered on the Senate floor. Democrats are currently filibustering seven such nominees. Also, Miguel Estrada withdrew his nomination to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia after GOP senators for months could not halt a similar filibuster against him.

Republicans — who control 51 of the Senate's 100 seats — are frustrated because they have the simple majority needed to win an up-or-down vote on nominations. But filibusters prevent reaching those votes. And "cloture" votes to stop filibusters require three-fifths majority, or 60 votes. Republicans do not have that. So the minority rules.

"They (Democrats) are treating these people just like dirt — and it gets particularly bad when they treat minorities as though they've got to have a particular (liberal) mindset or they are out of the mainstream of American jurisprudence. That's pure bunk," Hatch said last week at a press conference declaring war.

Hatch believes Americans have not paid much attention to Democratic blocks of pro-life and minority candidates — and that they might punish Democrats next year if they did.