Hypocrisy Award - cue "Rocky Top"

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is the latest Hypocrisy Award recipient for his blatant lies about filibuster history now that the record has become quite inconvenient for his presidential ambitions.

The Lies:

In a speech to the Federalist Society arguing against the filibuster, Senator Frist said:

Tonight I want to share with you my thoughts about the filibuster of judicial nominees: it is radical; it is dangerous; and it must be overcome.

The Senate must be allowed to confirm judges who fairly, justly and independently interpret the law. The current Minority has filibustered 10 -- and threatened to filibuster another 6 -- nominees to federal appeals courts. This is unprecedented in over 200 years of Senate history. Never before has a Minority blocked a judicial nominee that has majority support for an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

Never.

….Bob Dole’s Republican Minority didn’t filibuster Democrat Bill Clinton’s nominees.

The Hypocrisy:

Two specific attempts to filibuster Clinton judicial nominees in 2000 failed – that is not enough Republican Senators were willing to join the filibustering minority in order for it to succeed. Furthermore, the filibuster was used to defeat LBJ’s Chief Justice Nominee in 1968 – so it has been done.

Only ten of Bush’s 229 judicial nominees have been successfully filibustered. Because the Dems are the minority, the filibuster is the only check against the ample poor judgment in competence this President has so repeatedly demonstrated (see John Bolton) in his appointments.

And let’s make an important distinction; the Republicans didn’t need to filibuster against Clinton because they were in the majority (beginning in 1995), which means as chairs of the committees overseeing the initial hearings they didn’t even need to bring his nominees up on committee agendas.

Of course, for the first two years of the Bush administration, when the Dems had a one vote majority thanks to Jim Jeffords defection, they returned the favor for the GOP’s not holding hearings on dozens of Clinton nominees by doing the same thing to Bush’s nominees. However, after the GOP returned to majority status in 2003, they have had no excuse for not at least moving these votes to the floor.

The problem for the GOP, though, is the threat of Democratic filibusters means potential embarrassment to the party as well as greater exposure and public scrutiny of some of Bush’s nominees as extremists. This is what they are afraid of, and so we see this urgent need to get rid of the filibuster so they can quickly and quietly continue pandering to the fringe fundamentalist wing of their party.

Frist knows this, and his statements to the Federalist Society, meant for broader public consumption, are patently false. His latest gambit to equate filibustering to being “against people of faith” -Justice Sunday- is yet one more reckless example of political pandering to a small group of fundamentalists bent on remaking the US as a theocratic, authoritarian state.