Senate confirms first of 3 judges

WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed on Thursday the first of President Bush's controversial judicial nominees, Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, ending her four-year wait to join the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

By a 56-43 vote that largely followed political party lines, the Republican-led Senate confirmed Owen's nomination, the first such vote since a compromise was reached by moderate senators to avoid a dramatic change in Senate rules governing extended debate, or filibusters. Utah's two Republican senators, Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett voted in favor of Owen.

Only two Democrats, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, voted for Owen; and only one Republican, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, opposed her. All three were part of the group of 14 senators who fashioned the compromise.

The president, applauding the Senate's action on Owen, urged the lawmakers to "build on this progress" and provide up or down votes on his other pending federal appellate court nominees.

But under the agreement reached this week, only two other nominees are guaranteed a vote: Janice Rogers Brown of California, to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and William Pryor, to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

And Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., who had threatened to change the Senate's rules to force a vote on Owen and other nominees, expressed regret Thursday that the deal had sidetracked his efforts to permanently bar filibusters of judicial nominees.

He said Owen was "a gentle woman, an accomplished lawyer, and a brilliant jurist" who had been "unconscionably denied an up-or-down vote" since Bush first nominated her in 2001.

But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the Senate should "just move on" to other business because the fight to eliminate judicial filibusters is "over with."

Hatch, the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which reviews judicial nominations before they come to the Senate floor, said the moderates' agreement is "merely a truce . . . not a treaty yet."

Still, the agreement was enough to clear the way for the confirmation of Owen, whose conservative political views and rulings during the 10 years she has been a Supreme Court justice in Texas sparked charges from Democrats that she is out of the mainstream of jurisprudence.