Washington – The day after he voted to confirm John Roberts, President Bush’s nominee for chief justice, Colorado Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar moved left Friday, saying Bush “acts like a king.”
“He’s imperious in that he believes he controls Washington and controls our country and does so sometimes in a way that ‘it’s my way or the highway’ and doesn’t take into account what other people are thinking,” Salazar said of Bush.
Salazar also repeated his vow that he would not vote for Janice Rogers Brown or Priscilla Owen, federal appeals court judges who have been named as possible nominees for the opening left on the U.S. Supreme Court. Both are considered very conservative.
“I don’t think either one of them bring the academic background or the professional expertise to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said.
Salazar was a member of the “Gang of 14” group of senators from both parties that cleared the way for Brown’s and Owen’s appeals court confirmation votes in exchange for maintaining the right to filibuster other Bush appointees.
Speaking to reporters Friday, Salazar stopped short of saying he would take part in a filibuster to try to block confirmation of either woman if she were nominated to the Supreme Court, saying only that “I have never filibustered a judicial nominee. I hope I never have to.”
One political analyst said Salazar wants to be perceived as a moderate and has to swing left to “compensate just a little bit for the fact that he backed the president on John Roberts.”
“It’s also a little bit of a sop to his more liberal supporters in Colorado who might be dissatisfied with him that he voted for Roberts,” said Bob Loevy, political science professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Salazar was one of 22 Democrats who voted Thursday to confirm Roberts. He has the highest rate among Senate Democrats of voting yes on Bush’s judicial nominees.
Many Democrats – and even some Republicans – have been issuing similar statements as a word of warning to Bush, said Norman Ornstein, political analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group.
“There were a lot of Democrats who ended up voting for Roberts who want to say: ‘Look, we’ve got some traction now because you can’t say we won’t vote for any nominee you send up. We can make life pretty difficult for you,”‘ Ornstein said.
Salazar has urged Bush to consider ethnic and gender diversity when picking a nominee.
He also reiterated his call for a Hispanic nominee.
