|
 ith
the nomination of Charles Pickering to a place on the Fifth Circuit
Court of Appeals nearly dead, Senate minority leader Trent Lott
held a meeting Thursday afternoon with Republican members of the
Senate Judiciary Committee to plan a post-Pickering strategy for
judicial-confirmation battles. According to a source familiar with
the proceedings, there were "a lot of angry feelings"
in the room, not only about Democratic attacks on Pickering but
about the general treatment of Bush-administration judicial nominees.
"This has been a very sobering lesson," the source says.
But the meeting
wasn't really about Pickering. "Actually, not much was said
about him," says the source. "Most people are resigned
to the fact that we are not going to get him." Instead, the
focus of the meeting was what to do next. "We need to have
a strategy to move forward," the source continues. "We
need to be tougher, we need to have White House involvement, we
need to find ways to counter the interest groups on the other side."
As improbable
as it might seem to veterans of confirmation wars, some in the GOP
were surprised by the ferocity of Democratic attacks on Pickering.
Some Republicans were apparently lulled into a sense of confidence
by Pickering's lack of any obvious vulnerabilities; after all, Pickering
had been unanimously confirmed to the U.S. District Court ten years
before, with the votes of Democratic senators who now oppose him.
Also, the American Bar Association, assessing his decade of work
on the bench, gave Pickering its "well qualified" rating.
And he had the support of many community leaders, both black and
white, in his home state of Mississippi, as well as the support
of both home-state senators.
Yet the Democratic
attack came, and some Republicans were not ready for it. Now, as
they consider what to do next, one of the issues they are grappling
with is how involved President Bush should be in appeals-court nomination
battles. Should the president enter the public fray on behalf of
specific nominees for the federal courts of appeal? Or should the
president save his words for the Supreme Court nominations that
he might have to make at any time?
By most accounts,
the White House has done little to support Pickering, who was nominated
at the insistence of his friend Trent Lott. At a White House briefing
Tuesday, spokesman Ari Fleischer repeated an earlier assertion that
"the president believes in Judge Pickering and will fight for
Judge Pickering." But when a reporter asked what, precisely,
the president had in mind, Fleischer answered, "I think he'll
just make an assessment at the appropriate time about what that
means, of what level of activity he will personally engage in. He'll
just make that call as it gets closer."
That call apparently
was made the next day, on Wednesday morning, when Bush brought the
subject up during a White House meeting that included Lott and Senate
Majority Leader Tom Daschle. One source familiar with that conversation
says Bush made a flat statement that the Senate should confirm Pickering.
"The president said Pickering deserves to be confirmed,"
the source says. "When he said that, Lott jumped in and said
he was disappointed in how Pickering was being treated." Daschle,
according to the source, was non-committal.
Afterwards,
Daschle denied that Bush had made an appeal for Pickering's confirmation.
"The president didn't ask for a floor vote," Daschle told
reporters Wednesday afternoon. "He asked what the prospects
were, and I said I didn't know. There wasn't any request of me to
take it to the floor. He made his general views known about the
need to move ahead on judges, and expressed the hope that we could
confirm as many as possible." Daschle said he told Bush "that's
a matter for the Judiciary Committee....I respect the Judiciary
Committee's decisions, and we have to accept those."
Daschle's account
appears implausible; it seems unlikely that Bush would bring up
the Pickering nomination simply to ask what the prospects were,
since the president surely knows they are dismal. It's more likely
that Bush said just what other witnesses said he said — that
Pickering should be confirmed. Republicans in Congress can take
some comfort in that, since it is unusual for a president to make
a personal appeal on behalf of a nominee to an appeals-court seat.
On the other hand, Bush's pro-Pickering pitch was not terribly forceful
— Daschle felt free to ignore it completely — and it came
very, very late in the game.
Now, Republicans
appear to have come to the conclusion that they must do much, much
better the next time. Democrats are making no secret of their intention
to oppose several of the president's more conservative nominees,
and even some of the Senate's less-confrontational Republicans have
realized that the Pickering fight was just the first of many to
come.
|
