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coming weeks, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee plan to
hold a series of hearings which they say will help clarify the issues
involved in the judicial-confirmation process — and which Republicans
believe will serve to establish a legal and political basis for
rejecting George W. Bush's nominees for federal judgeships.
Next Tuesday,
New York Democrat Charles Schumer, the new chairman of the Subcommittee
on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, will hold a hearing
entitled, "Should Ideology Matter? Judicial Nominations 2001."
Next month, according to Senate sources, committee chairman Patrick
Leahy will hold hearings to discuss the Rehnquist Court, federal
jurisprudence, and conservative judicial activism.
Republicans
believe the hearings will amount to a one-two punch against Bush's
nominees. The Schumer session will establish that it is acceptable
to oppose nominees solely on ideological grounds, and the Leahy
hearing will suggest that Bush's nominees hold views that are dangerously
out of touch with those of most Americans. The end result will be
the conclusion that Democrats are justified in voting against the
president's nominees, even if they seem well-qualified to hold office.
Democrats deny
that there is any overarching strategy at work. "Basically,
the senator wants to take a look at how we should view the process
for confirming judges," says Schumer spokesman Bradley Tusk.
"What role should ideology play? I think there's some confusion
on how we should deal with the issue."
Nevertheless,
the witness lists for the hearings are likely to be tilted in favor
of the emerging Democratic consensus that senators can legitimately
vote against judges on the basis of ideology alone. In the past,
senators who disagreed with a nominee's judicial philosophy have
often been forced to search for a disqualifying flaw on which they
could base their opposition, while steadfastly maintaining that
ideology had nothing to do with it.
For example,
in the 1987 fight over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork,
wrote the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne in an influential
recent column, "Liberals couldn't simply oppose Bork. To block
him, they had to trash him." Now, Dionne continued, Democrats
are "no longer shilly-shallying. They're saying, right from
the start, that they'll oppose judicial nominees on philosophical
grounds alone."
Republicans
have gotten the message. "They're laying the groundwork,"
one GOP aide says of the Democrats' plans. "They're trying
to paint all of our judges as right-wing extremists who are here
to turn back the clock on civil rights. To be mainstream and moderate,
therefore, they have to stop them."
Meanwhile,
as Schumer and Leahy plan their hearings, the work of actually confirming
the president's nominees has ground to a halt. No hearings have
been scheduled for the confirmation of any of the nearly two-dozen
nominees so far announced by the White House.
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