Democrats, though a minority in the U.S. Senate, have blocked votes on several judicial nominations made by President George W. Bush. This inspired a big rally Sunday at the Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. Televised nationally on several religious channels, it was called “Justice Sunday – Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith.”
In ways, it’s too bad that the Almighty was not inclined to repeat the events of Chapter 5 of the Book of Acts, wherein Ananias and his wife, Sapphira, were struck dead for lying.
But as it is, we can try plain old logic to demonstrate that the Justice Sunday folks are playing loose with the truth. Just follow their assumptions and see where they lead:
They say that Senate Democrats are blocking votes on nominations for federal judgeships because those nominees are “people of faith.”
It follows, then, that the nominations which did get through must be those for “people of no faith,” since they were acceptable to the faith-blockers who would have otherwise used the rules of the Senate to halt the nomination.
Now note that of the 215 judicial nominations made by President Bush, 205 have been confirmed by the Senate. This means that 95 percent of the time, Bush must have proposed a faithless judicial nominee – an agnostic, an atheist, a humanist, who knows? Why weren’t they railing against the president if they think it’s so important to have federal judges who are “people of faith”?
Instead, the Justice Sunday crowd was blasting away at the U.S. Supreme Court for “finding a constitutional right to sodomy” and at the U.S. Senate for its alleged failure to perform its proper constitutional role.
Current Senate rules require 60 votes to stop a filibuster (unlimited debate) on a judicial nomination. A simple majority of 51 could change that rule to require only 51 votes to stop the filibuster. But Democrats say that if the Republicans (who hold 55 Senate seats) change that rule, then they’ll use other Senate rules to bring business to a halt.
The federal Constitution is terse about judicial appointments. Article II, Section 2 says the president “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the senate, shall appoint … judges of the supreme court and all other officers of the United States.”
The Federalist Papers offer explanations from several Founding Fathers. Alexander Hamilton called the nominating process “a concurrent authority in appointing to offices,” and predicted the nominations “would naturally become matters of notoriety.”
Elsewhere in the papers, Hamilton explains that the Senate was designed to protect the rights of political minorities; that’s why each state, large or small, has an equal vote there.
The Senate also was designed to be a counterbalance to public excitements, according to James Madison in Federalist Paper 63: “[T]here are particular moments in public affairs, when the people stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In those critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens … to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth, can regain their authority over the public mind?”
But what does Madison know, compared to R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary? He told the Justice Sunday gathering that, “We are not asking for persons merely to be moral. We want them to be believers.”
Believing judges like Tomas de Torquemada, who ran the Inquisition in 15th century Spain and burned books and people suspected of heresy? Or John Hathorne of Salem, Mass., a devout man who presided over witch trials in 1692 and sent young women to the gallows based on “spectral evidence”?
It’s worth a filibuster or two to spare us from such inspired judgment. If that provokes a rule change that lets Democrats bring all Senate business to a halt, then that body will not be approving more tax breaks for billionaires, contriving new felonies or extending the Patriot Act. All clouds may not have silver linings, but this one does.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
