Last Friday, President Bush exercised his ability to make recess appointments to the federal bench and finally installed Judge William Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, echoing his similar appointment of Judge Charles Pickering earlier this year. And since virtually all who have worked with those two have lauded them with the highest praise, many would say that it's about time they got their due, but not if you hear some people tell it.
"President Bush keeps finding new ways to demonstrate his contempt for our system of checks and balances," says Ralph Neas of the liberal advocacy group People For The American Way (ahem). "Contempt for our system" is a strange way to describe the use of recess appointments, a perfectly legitimate legal power the president has always been entitled to by the Constitution, and one which has been used more than 300 times in the past couple centuries. It's not like Bush was rankly abusing the concept of the filibuster or anything.
Speaking of which: Senate Democrat Patrick Leahy himself said that the president has "divided the American people and the Senate with his controversial judicial nominees." And Sen. Charles Schumer warns, "Regularly circumventing the advise-and-consent process is not the way to change the tone in Washington."
Now irony is one thing, but when Senate Democrats' hypocrisy becomes this bad they run the risk of turning into living paradoxes and short-circuiting themselves out of existence. Because for the past year now, congressional Democrats, having realized that the Republican-controlled Senate would likely win in a vote over the appointment of any of President Bush's judicial nominees, have foregone voting and instead opted to filibuster Bush's would-be judges. ALL of them.
This is not the kind of filibuster where Jimmy Stewart nobly talks nonstop until he collapses from exhaustion; this is the "filibuster-lite," where all the Senate Democrats basically team up in a boring parliamentary delay tactic to block a vote, and the filibuster can only be overcome by 60 votes or more (Republicans currently have only 51 senators). Unless such a supermajority is reached, the filibuster continues, and the Senate cannot go about business as usual.
To make an analogy, it's like being the parent of a selfish child: you want him to eat his vegetables, you tell him his vegetables are good for him, you tell him that he can even have dessert afterward ... but instead of listening, the child grabs the nearest steak knife and threatens to stab himself in the face until you get all the vegetables out of the house.
It is literally no more mature than that -- grown politicians behaving like spoiled children. And now that President Bush has used his recess appointment ability to make an end-run around shameless Democrats, the kid is whining how unfair it is that mommy locked all the sharp knives away in the cupboard.
The filibuster was clearly never meant to be used this way: a "last resort" weapon that the minority party could use whenever it was short on seats. Democrats are panicking now that Bush is trying to appoint Supreme Court-candidate judges who might actually uphold the Constitution and not perpetually invent new rights from it out of whole cloth (liberals always talk about how they want a "living" Constitution, but I like my Constitution how I like my terrorists: dead).
So far, the threat of such a "conservative" Supreme Court is the only thing that's scared Democrats enough to use the filibuster about as shamelessly as John Kerry uses his war record, but that could change with time. Bush's use of recess appointments is sending Democrats the right message: you've gone too far.
Enjoy your asparagus, Schumer.
Eric Spratling is a public relations senior whose mother NEVER had any trouble getting him to eat his vegetables. Reach him at eric.spratling@asu.edu.
