This forum has been active for so long that some of the opinions offered here over the years now have an almost historical interest. Take
this 2009 post from the "President Obama: What's Next?" thread, which I quote here for reasons that will become clear:
Faramond wrote: ↑Wed Feb 04, 2009 1:47 am
There were not 'many' filibusters of Bush court nominees, there was a well-considered handful against extremists, and that is not comparable to the constant misuse of the filibuster that Republicans engaged in in the last session.
Miguel Estrada, Priscilla Owen, Charles W. Pickering, Carolyn Kuhl, David W. McKeague, Henry Saad, Richard Allen Griffin, William H. Pryor, William Gerry Myers III, Janice Rogers Brown.
Ten nominees filibustered. I have heard that to a cat, any number higher than two is
many. We're not cats around here, so the
many threshold is likely higher, but I've never heard of ten not being considered
many.
And --- of course it was
well considered. It better have been, since filibustering was almost never used previously on court appointees. I am sure that most filibusters in history have been well considered. Even the bad ones, like the filibusters of civil rights legislation in the 60's. They had their reasons, their convictions, they thought about the consequences, and at the last they fought the horrible danger they saw before them with the filibuster. "Well considered" is not a passport to a moral path. It is only to say that they felt they were justified by their own standards. Which is saying almost nothing at all. Have the Republicans ever initiated a filibuster that was not misuse, by your understanding? What is the standard for calling a filibuster misuse?
Legislation does not and should not require a super majority to pass!
Legislation has always required something more than a simple majority to pass. It must get out of committee and survive amending and survive alternate version between chambers --- there are so many ways for a bill to die that don't involve that final vote. Most bills die without ever being voted on. This is the way it is, even though the Constitution makes no provision for all these other methods of killing a bill. Those barriers to passage that have nothing to do with obtaining the majority vote are a curse. And a blessing. It depends, you know?
The upshot of all this is --- Republicans are still bedeviling Democrats and the other good people of this country. Such power the Republicans have, even from beyond the metaphorical grave. 41 Senators and one Rush Limbaugh, and they have vexed all!
I would instead suggest that Republicans are irrelevant here. It is the bill that matters. The bill is bad. It is bloated. It is filled with bad spending and unaffordable tax cuts. Obama would do well to spend less time trying to be bipartisan and more time trying to hammer out a good bill. One with efficient, targeted spending that clobbers the deficit to the minimum extent possible. Until that happens I hope this bill fails. I hope Obama fails, even. Until he starts attempting to do the right thing. And I think he might. Or at least get closer.
Had a Democrat said that about Pres. Bush's attempts to take action in a national emergency, it would have rightfully been decried as treasonous.
Did you never agree with Bush's actions in a national emergency? Did you never hope that some of his proposed solutions during that emergency might fail? That he might fail, in effect? Gitmo was a response to the national emergency of 911. Was it treasonous to hope Bush failed to open and maintain it? When is opposition to a president treason? When does speech become treasonous and not protected?
The conventional wisdom nowadays is that the "bad ... bloated" stimulus bill that passed In 2009 was
too small: it needed to be much larger to quickly ease the suffering caused by the Great Recession, from which the U.S. didn't fully recover until at least 2016. (Having learned that lesson perhaps too well, the Covid-19 relief bills passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021 may have been a little too generous, thus contributing something to the recent inflation -- which, however, is a global phenomenon not fully attributable to any one cause). But the reason I'm citing this post here is that it seems to be the only previous reference on these forums to Judge William Pryor, who is in that group of ten judges whose nominations were "filibustered" (in the modern sense by which the filibusterer is not obliged to actually filibuster) by Senate Democrats during the George W. Bush administration.
First, though, I'll pause to note that whether or not the ten Bush judges filibustered by Senate Democrats were properly considered "many" at the time, by 2013, President Obama had seen Senate Republicans filibuster 36 of his judicial nominees -- as many in four years
as had been filibustered during the previous
forty years. Expanding to all judicial and executive nominees, Obama had 79 blocked as comparted to 68 in total over the prior four decades: Senate Republican obstruction in the Obama administration was truly unprecedented. And that's why the Senate, under Harry Reid's leadership did away with the judicial filibuster (for all but Supreme Court nominees) in November of that year (something which was not mentioned in that thread, which has a gap from Dec. 2012 to Oct. 2014, although it might have come up in other discussions). But what about those ten judges? I'm not sure Senate Democrats should have filibustered all of them. Sometimes the reasons were ideological. Sometimes they were tit-for-tat in response to previous Republican actions. In what follows I lean a bit on Wikipedia.
Elena Kagan, during her Supreme Court confirmation in 2010, said that former Solicitor General
Miguel Estrada had a "towering intellect" and was a "fundamentally decent person" who was "superlative[ly]" qualified for the appellate position to which Bush had nominated him nine year earlier. He was blocked for his strong conservative views and was never confirmed.
Priscilla Owen (now Richman) was blocked by Senate Democrats because the seat she was nominated to fill in 2001 had been open since 1997; during the intervening four years, Senate Republicans had refused to give a hearing to either of the people President Bill Clinton had nominated for that role -- rather as Mitch McConnell did to President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016. She finally received a vote and was confirmed to the Fifth Circuit (where she still sits) as part of the "Gang of 14" compromise in 2005.
Despite having prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members in the early 1960s,
Charles W. Pickering switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in 1964 because he was upset at the "humiliation and embarrassment" his state of Mississippi suffered at the hands of pro-Civil Rights delegates at that year's
Democratic National Convention. As early as 1976, he was pushing for a Constitutional amendment to overturn
Roe v. Wade. Opposition to his Fifth Circuit appointment was widespread, but he did serve for a year on that court after President Bush made a recess appointment. Facing continued opposition to a permanent appointment, Pickering retired in 2004 at the age of 67.
It doesn't appear that
Carolyn Kuhl did anything worse than facilitating some backwards but fairly standard conservative decisions while a part of the Department of Justice during the Reagan administration and to making one ruling as a Los Angeles County judge (where she still sits) that seems rather odious (perhaps more so now than in 2001): when a doctor let a drug company salesman observe an undressed patient's breast exam, Judge Kuhl ruled that because the woman didn't object to the man's presence at the time (though for all she knew, he could have been another doctor), she didn't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." Creepy!
The nomination of
David McKeague to the Sixth Circuit was held up for the same reason as Owen above: Republicans had blocked President Clinton from filling two seats on that circuit, which thus remained vacant until Bush became president. McKeague eventually was confirmed by a vote of 96-0 after the Gang of 14 compromise.
Ditto for
Richard Allen Griffin, who was confirmed 95-0 in 2005 and still sits on the Sixth Circuit.
Henry Saad probably would have joined McKeague and Griffin on the Sixth Circuit thanks to the Gang of 14 compromise if he had not angered Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan by having sent an email in 2003 to a supporter in which he said of her, "This is the game they play. Pretend to do the right thing while abusing the system and undermining the constitutional process. Perhaps some day she will pay the price for her misconduct." Unfortunately, he accidentally copied that email to Stabenow's office. Oops!
I don't know why
William Myers, whom Democrats opposed for what they described as his anti-environmental views, was not part of the 2005 compromise.
Janice Rogers Brown, who was seated on California's Supreme Court in 1994 despite having been rated "not qualified" by the state bar, was blocked by Democrats in 2003 due to her conservative opinions (she had referred to the New Deal as a "socialist revolution"), but was confirmed as part of the 2005 compromise and served on the D.C. circuit until 2017.
And that leaves
William H. Pryor, who was blocked in 2003 for his far-right views (he argued in 1993 -- Wikipedia mistakenly says 2003 -- that decriminalizing homosexual activity would lead to the legalization of "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, incest and pedophilia"). In a twist of history, Pryor's appointment led to Brett Kavanaugh, then working in the Bush White House, apparently perjuring himself during his own confirmation hearings in 2006 (Wikipedia doesn't mention this but see
here) when he testified that he was "not involved in handling" Pryor's nomination, although it may depend on what "handling" meant: Kavanaugh was definitely closely involved in that process, but he pretended otherwise to the Senate (and when Kavanaugh was asked, "So you weren't involved in any of the vetting" of Pryor's nomination, he said "No"). Bush got Pryor onto the bench via a recess appointment in 2004, and Pryor was confirmed to a regular appointment in 2005 by a 53-46 vote, thanks to the Gang of 14. He remains on the Eleventh Circuit, where today, in an expected decision allowing Georgia's 6-week ban on abortions to go into effect, refers 21 times to Planned Parenthood and the other plaintiffs and appellees as "abortionists."
Maybe he has a son or a daughter he doesn't want anyone to know about... 