That’s the subtitle of my new Confirmation Tales post, “Leading Democrats Vote Against Clinton’s Strident Liberal Nominee,” which recounts what I think is an episode of unappreciated significance in the judicial-confirmation wars: the 1994 battle against Bill Clinton’s nomination of Lee Sarokin to the Third Circuit.

Our goal was to make Clinton and Senate Democrats pay a political price for supporting the Sarokin nomination. The fact that six Democrats—including majority whip Wendell Ford, past Democratic leader Robert Byrd, future Democratic leader Harry Reid, and aspiring Democratic leader Jim Sasser—voted against Sarokin one month before the 1994 elections was the first clear sign that we had succeeded.

An excerpt:

Perhaps nothing was more revealing than Tennessee senator Jim Sasser’s votes against cloture and confirmation. Sasser was a liberal, especially compared to other southern Democrats. He had voted against the Supreme Court nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. On a scale of 1 to 100, he had an American Conservative Union rating of 9 and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce rating of 17 (1990 data).
After beating incumbent Bill Brock by more than five percentage points in 1976, Sasser had breezed to re-election in 1982 by 24 points and in 1988 by 30 points. With Senate majority leader George Mitchell set to retire, Sasser was a leading candidate to succeed him. But he had to win re-election first, and he had discovered that Clinton’s deep unpopularity presented him a real challenge in defeating his Republican opponent, political novice and heart surgeon Bill Frist.
Frist made Sasser’s support of bad judges a prominent part of his campaign. He faulted Sasser for recommending Jimmy Carter’s appointment of a federal district judge in Nashville, John T. Nixon, who Frist said had “repeatedly hamstrung the courts by delaying action in death penalty cases,” and he charged that Sasser’s vote for Rosemary Barkett’s nomination showed that “he still hasn’t learned his lesson.”
Frist called on Sasser to vote against Sarokin. Sasser determined that he couldn’t afford to vote for Sarokin and, indeed, that he had to do his best to pretend that he was vehemently against Sarokin.
It didn’t work. In a huge upset, Frist defeated Sasser by more than 14 points.

Please read the whole post (some good nuggets in there), and please subscribe to Confirmation Tales.