Votes lined up to change rule, Frist says
- Feb 15, 2005 - comment
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he has the votes needed to revise a rule in an effort to confirm President Bush’s embattled judicial nominees. The Republican from Tennessee said, however, he does not know if he will call for the rule change the first time Democrats filibuster a nominee.
“We need to restore the over 200-year tradition and precedent of allowing every nominee of the President who has majority support an up-or-down vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” Frist told The Washington Times, according to its Feb. 14 issue.
Democrats have labeled a rule change the “nuclear option,” but Frist told The Times it was a “constitutional option. The nuclear option is what they did to me last year when they changed the precedent.”
Also on Feb. 14, the President sent to the Senate 20 federal judicial nominees, including seven of the appeals court nominees who were successfully filibustered by Democrats in Bush’s first term.
The Democrats filibustered 10 federal appeals court nominees in Bush’s first term, and the President resubmitted the seven who remained as candidates. Sixty votes are needed to invoke cloture, which ends a filibuster. Though several of the nominees received a majority of votes in Bush’s first term and would have been confirmed on the Senate floor, they did not gain the 60 votes for cloture.
ERLC President Richard Land applauded Frist’s “courageous leadership in seeking to bring an end to this nefarious and unprecedented obstructionism.”
“Senators have a right to advise and then vote either for or against a particular nominee,” Land said. “They do not have a constitutional right to keep the Senate from voting. That is clearly contrary to the intent of the Constitution and is by definition unconstitutional. [I]t is well past time for it to stop.”
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