Ready to Rumble
The plan to shoot down Republican judicial nominees.

June 20, 2001 2:45 p.m.

n 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.