Washington – The nasty skirmishing between conservative preacher James Dobson and Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar over the Senate filibuster rule is no random collision; it’s a harbinger of the impending battle over the future of the U.S. Supreme Court.
President Bush seems likely to have one or more opportunities to name new justices to the high court before he leaves office in 2009. As a member of the Senate, Salazar will have a say in confirming or rejecting those nominees.
Chief Justice William Rehn quist, 80, is suffering from cancer and is widely expected to retire at the end of the court’s term in June. Three other aging justices – John Paul Stevens, 85, Sandra Day O’Connor, 75, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 72 – also have been treated for cancer.
Dobson’s Focus on the Family group has been at the forefront of social and religious conservatives who believe the federal courts have undercut traditional moral standards. They are ramping up for a confirmation fight.
“He is increasingly using his goodwill and media access to promote far-right politics and politicians, and to push the Republican Party to more vigorously adopt the Religious Right’s social agenda,” a recent report from the liberal People for the American Way foundation concluded.
As they wait for the justices to announce their retirement plans, activists on both sides are trying to groom the political battlefield to their advantage.
Conservatives have singled out the Senate filibuster rule as an obstacle they need to remove. It takes a majority of the 100 senators to confirm a federal judge, but under the filibuster rule, a three-fifths vote of the Senate is first required to end debate and move to an up-or-down vote. Since there are but 55 Republican senators, they need Democratic assistance to call the roll.
Most federal judges are Republican appointees, and most judges are routinely approved. But the Democrats used the filibuster to block 10 of Bush’s 214 nominees to the federal courts in his first term.
Republicans, led by Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, have threatened to use a legislative maneuver – often referred to as “the nuclear option” – to change the Senate rules and end the filibustering of judicial nominees.
“What they’d like to do is take away the filibuster … and then try to – as they think Bush promised to them – get justices in the mode of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia appointed to the Supreme Court,” said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way. “If there’s a Thomas-Scalia majority, then James Dobson … and company get everything they’ve ever wanted, their entire agenda that they’ve been working for the last 20 or 30 or 40 years.”
Focus spokeswoman Carrie Gordon Earll did not disagree. “If it’s not in the Constitution, you can’t pencil it in the margins to put it in as a judge,” she said. “Yet repeatedly we’ve seen rulings by the court where they are creating rights that are clearly not in the Constitution.”
Those include the right to abortion established in Roe vs. Wade, and the 2003 ruling protecting gay sexual privacy, Lawrence vs. Texas, she said.
The Focus political action committee has announced that it is running radio and newspaper advertising in 16 states, demanding that Salazar and 19 other reluctant senators (mostly from swing states and including eight Republicans) vote to end the filibusters.
The ads cite judicial rulings in the Terri Schiavo and other cases as proof that federal judges have “no mercy … no humanity … no decency … no respect.”
The Schiavo ad, and promotions for today’s “Justice Sunday” rally and telecast from Louisville, Ky., that portray filibuster supporters as the enemies of “people of faith,” infuriated many Democrats, including Salazar.
“What has happened here is that there has been a hijacking of the United States Senate by what I call the religious right wing of this country and the un-Christian movement led by people in my own state like Focus on the Family,” Salazar said late last week.
Dobson chided the senator in an exchange of letters last week.
“It is clear that liberals are blocking judicial nominees with strong religious convictions precisely because of those convictions,” Dobson wrote.
There was but one sign of civility. In his letter to Dobson, Salazar asked the preacher to say a prayer for him. Dobson, in reply, said he would.
