Littwin: Senate heats up; Salazar cools off

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Littwin: Senate heats up; Salazar cools off

May 21, 2005

pictureThis time, for what it's worth, Ken Salazar is trying not to pick a fight.

This time, when everyone's got the gloves off, Salazar is reaching for a whistle.

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You have to admire his self-restraint. I mean, when I left him Friday, he hadn't called anyone the antichrist, or any other seven-headed beast from the Bible, all day.

And he was up early.

It's not, as James Dobson would surely understand, that he hasn't been tempted. Where is the surprisingly combative new senator to look for a role model?

Read the reports from the floor of the Senate on Thursday and see if you can find one.

Rick Santorum, the third-ranking Republican, actually compared the Democrats to Hitler in Paris in 1942. And, yes, you're right, it was Santorum - play it again, Rick? - who two months earlier had demanded that Robert Byrd retract his line on Republicans and Nazi Germany.

Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg, meanwhile, likened House Majority Leader Bill Frist to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who is, admittedly, evil - but only in Star Wars movies. At least he stopped himself before comparing him to Jar Jar.

As if to prove the point, Frist said the Democrats were trying "to kill, to defeat, to assassinate" Bush's judicial nominees. He might have been flustered, though, since he had just been reminded that he himself once voted to uphold a filibuster on a judge.

If it wasn't a great day for the country, it wasn't bad if you worked for C-SPAN2. I just kept waiting for someone to hold up a photo of Saddam Hussein in his underwear.

But Salazar didn't take the bait. As you may have heard, he belongs to a bipartisan Senate group some have called the D.C. 12, which has shrunk, I believe, to 10. The D.C. 12 and Falling are trying to find a compromise to avert a nuclear meltdown.

If the Democrats try to filibuster a judicial nominee, Republicans have threatened to change the Senate rules to end judicial filibusters. You need 60 votes to end debate, but apparently only 51 to change the rules on debate. If that happens, Democrats have threatened to slow down the work of the Senate, which you'd think was already slow enough.

In any case, the process began Friday with a call for the end of debate on nominee Priscilla Owen. Salazar was already home Friday, making his case at a news conference on a spit of land next to the Burger King on Broadway. The traffic was loud. The sun was blazing.

"You can tell I'm a new senator," he said, looking around, as an ambulance siren blasted.

But what a time to be a new senator - just in time to see the place blow up.

If you're behind in the news, a brief update.

George W. Bush has renominated Priscilla Owen to be a federal appeals judge. Owen is an extremely conservative Texas Supreme Court justice. She's a Karl Rove favorite who used to be an Enron favorite when there was an Enron. She once had a ruling called "an unconscionable act of judicial activism" - by Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general. (He now supports her nomination.)

She was one of seven judges Bush has renominated of 10 who had been successfully filibustered. Next up is Janice Rogers Brown, who once said the New Deal "marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution."

You know why these judges have been renominated. If you don't, ask James Dobson. Get your video of Justice Sunday. Listen to people tell you that an up-or-down vote on judges is somehow a moral issue. Watch for the introduction of FDR-as-socialist action figures.

You saw Salazar get caught right in the middle of this battle. Now, he's trying to stay in the middle, with people like John McCain, trying to lure other moderate Republicans.

The compromise Salazar backs would allow some of Bush's nominees to go forward if the Republicans would allow filibusters in what Salazar calls "extraordinary circumstances."

Salazar had 30-minute private meetings with both Owen and Brown. When I asked if he thought they qualified as "extraordinary" cases - as, say, I do - he wouldn't say. He did say both were nice people, which may or may not be the same thing.

Of course, there's no real principle at stake when it comes to a filibuster. It's a rule, not a moral good or ill. It was immoral when it was used to block civil rights legislation - not to block judges you find philosophically unsound.

And Republicans, crying now about Democratic filibusters, had used other methods to effectively block Clinton judicial nominees.

The only principle at stake is whether Democrats will have a say - with 44 votes and one sympathetic independent - when Bush nominates a Supreme Court justice. This fight is all prologue.

Salazar made his case, for Democratic advice and consent, as the traffic zoomed by the Burger King, noting that, with a bare majority of voters, Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, while seven of nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents.

"They've already had 96 percent of all the president's judicial appointees confirmed," he said. "One hundred percent of all of his Cabinet appointees have been confirmed. And that's not good enough. They want it 100 percent their way."

He called it a Republican "overreach."

It may have been the nicest thing anyone said all day.