In the article I posted yesterday, Shumer made it sound like Democratic control of the Senate was going to be one big happy party, everyone will cross party line to implement the Democratic agenda and Schumer would have control over what type of judge gets on the bench but Bush has just resubmitted his selections (I'm assuming without the oversight of Schumer) and McConnell doesn't sound like he'll be doing the bidding of Schumer. He confirmed on the Hugh Hewitt show that the Republicans will filibuster to be able to have a say in legislation and will filibuster legislation until the judges are confirmed:
MM: I really don't know, but I will remind your listeners and your readers that it takes 60 votes to do just about everything in the Senate. 49 is the most robust minority. Nothing will leave the Senate that doesn't have our imprint. We'll either stop it if we think it's bad for America, or shape it, hopefully right of center. So the minority leader's job is actually a lot easier. When you're the minority leader, you're looking for 41 votes. When you're the majority leader, you're looking for 60. So Senator Reid can expect all of the cooperation that he extended us in similar circumstances. I think that, coupled with the potential for presidential vetoes, should reassure everyone that we're certainly not going to be run over. We didn't have a good election day, but 51-49 is pretty darned close, and we've...you know, we've had, Hugh, close Senates in recent years. It was 50-50 in 2000, and then Jeffords went over to the Democrats, and we were down 51-49 for 18 months. And then, back up 51-49 for two years, and then 55-45 for two years, and now 51-49 down. I think the message is that American politics these days is very, very tight. Close.The Democrats are about to experience the pain that they inflicted on the Republicans in the last election cycle. And their base is about to recognize the frustration that we've experienced when your leaders either compromise or don't get the things done that they promised. They are going to need 60 votes for anything they want to pass and Republicans had a very hard time getting 60 when they had 55 members and the Democrats only have 51 (and Chafee is gone and McCain has to look like a conservative for the next two years so that will be harder, though Snow just got re-elected so there is one possible vote :-)HH: Well, I can't tell you how wonderful that is to hear you say that they'll get exactly what they gave, Senator McConnell. You have a reputation for tenaciousness earned during the campaign finance reform debates. Do you expect to be living up to that reputation in the next two years?
MM: Well, I think it's reasonable to assume I'm not likely to be a push-over. And you know, we've...this sounds kind of strange to say, because obviously, I'd prefer to have 50 votes at a minimum, and be technically the majority leader, even though we wouldn't have much of a majority. Some of my most exhilarating moments in the Senate have been while we were in the minority. And an issue you mentioned, I actually organized and carried out the last all-night, true filibuster we've had in the Senate. It was about six weeks before the 1994 election, where we were able to kill taxpayer funding of elections and spending limits. It was a huge headline in the Washington Post and the New York Times, Republicans Kill Campaign Reform Measure. That was six weeks before we had the best Republican Congressional election of the 20th Century. So obviously, the voters were not offended by us stopping that monstrosity.
HH: Right. Senator McConnell, today, the New York Observer quotes Chuck Schumer, your colleague from New York, as saying that judges are the most important. One more justice would have made it a 5-4 conservative, hard-right majority for a long time. That won't happen. How do you respond to that?
MM: Well, judges are important. And we've gotten two Supreme Court justices. Both of them we expect to be solid conservatives in this current Congress. In addition to that, in spite of the fact that we haven't gotten every single judge, the overall vacancy rate is 5.7%, which is lower than at any time in recent memory. The vacancy rate actually is the lowest it's been in the last 20 years. So we have been able to get a lot of judges on the bench, and we expect to have the same kind of cooperation from them, that has previously been extended when we had divided government. Let me just give you some statistics. In the last two years of the last three presidents, all of which were in divided government, the Senate has confirmed on average 92 judicial nominees, including 17 circuit court nominees. So the precedent in recent years, when you have divided government, in the last two years of an administration of both parties, is that you are able to confirm a significant number of judicial nominees, including circuit court nominees. We expect from them the same level of cooperation we extended to President Clinton. We decided he'd been elected president, and we were not entitled to deny him all of his judges. Elections do have consequences, and in the last two years of the Clinton administration, when we had 55 Republicans in the Senate, we still confirmed over 70 of his judicial nominees, including 15 circuit court nominees. Now a lot of conservatives would say why did you do that. Well, the reason we did it, he won the election. And President Bush won the election, and we expect the same level of cooperation from them, as we gave them under similar circumstances. If we don't get it, let me just confirm again, Hugh, that in the Senate, everything is related to everything else. The minority has a lot of power in the Senate. This is not the House of Representatives. Everything will be linked to everything else. And if they're looking for cooperation from us in moving legislation on the floor, which they will need to be able to do anything, it's going to be tied to fair treatment of the President's judicial nominees.
HH: Senator McConnell, what I would love to hear you or the minority whip, Lott, or someone in leadership say over and over again is that if obstruction is the rule of Senator Leahy's Judiciary Committee, especially as to Supreme Court justices, the next Democratic president, may it be decades away, but when the next Democratic president comes along, there will be payback.
MM: Well, sure. I mean, these precedents that are started in the Senate are almost never stopped. We were able to get the filibuster genie back in the bottle. As you know, Summer a year ago, we were able to get Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor and Priscilla Owen, who had become kind of poster children for the left, we got them all confirmed, not to mention two solid Supreme Court nominees. So I think we've pushed them back on the filibuster. Now the filibuster is considered something that would be done only on rare circumstances. It had become routine. So we'll see whether they honor the most recent precedent. If they don't, they're going to have a lot of problems moving anything on the floor.
