Battle Over Judicial Nominees Coming to a Head
by Bill Fancher and Jody Brown
May 18, 2005
(AgapePress) - Today could be the day Americans find out who will win the battle over President Bush's nominees. It all comes down to whether Democrats in the U.S. Senate will succeed in their effort to maintain the right to filibuster those nominees.Debate began today (May 18) on Priscilla Owen, 50, a member of the Texas Supreme Court who was nominated four years ago to fill a vacancy on the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. An active member of St. Barnabas the Encourager Evangelical Covenant Church in Austin, Owen has been labeled by Senate opponents as a "judicial activist" whose rulings have shown bias in favor of government secrecy and against the environment.
But Owen's nomination has yet to make it to an up-or-down vote before the Senate. That final step of confirmation to the federal bench has been stalled by a filibuster engineered by Senate Democrats that, under current Senate rules, cannot be stopped except by a vote of 60 members -- even though it would take only 51 votes by the full Senate to confirm Owen.
Senate Republicans, the majority party, have threatened to take away the Democrats' option of filibustering judicial nominees -- and in return, Democrats have threatened to bring Senate business to a grinding halt. In fact, the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist reports that shutdown may have already begun. According to Frist's communication director, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has threatened to delay progress on legislation currently before the Senate and to close down committee meetings.
Janet Folger | |
Janet Folger of Faith2Action says the battle over conservative, pro-life judicial nominees has become a conflict like no other."[M]ake no mistake," she comments, "[the pro-abortion side knows] this is the war. This is about the Supreme Court. This is about whether we will ever protect children again, in our lifetime, who happen to reside in the most dangerous place to be in America -- the womb."
Owen is not alone. Via the filibuster, Democrats in the Senate have been preventing confirmation of pro-life and Christian nominees for the better part of George W. Bush's tenure in the White House. Next in line after Owen could be Janice Rogers Brown, an associate justice on the California Supreme Court who, like Owen, comes highly rated by the American Bar Association. But an official with Concerned Women for America contends the records of these conservative nominees are being distorted by Democrats who, for example, maintain Owen is outside mainstream America.
"Democrats' willful distortion of Justice Owen's record and qualifications should not be tolerated by Republicans during the debates," says CWA chief counsel Jan LaRue. "There's no excuse for allowing this remarkable jurist to twist-in-the-wind as she's attacked on the Senate floor."
According to LaRue, the Democrats' idea of a mainstream judge is someone like Judge Joseph Bataillon, the federal judge in Nebraska who last week struck down that state's constitutional amendment protecting marriage -- even though 70 percent of the state's voters approved the amendment.
Faith2Action's Folger says it is time for the filibusters to end. "If we want to see marriage protected, if we want to have the right to the freedoms that we enjoy right now, it's all about the Supreme Court," she says. "And to get to that place, we've got to break through this obstruction. We've got to break through the filibuster, because right now, they have the tyranny of the minority."
The Faith2Action leader insists this battle over getting strict constructionists like Owen and Brown on the federal bench will influence the nation's direction for decades to come.
