Alito Confirmation a Tribute to Gang of 14's Compromise on Judicial Filibusters

No matter what your ideology, the Senate cloture vote on the nomination of Samuel Alito to be an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court must come as good news.

It was a vote for civil debate over judicial nominations after decades of ideological warfare and character assassination.

By this vote, the Senate has upheld the traditional view that the philosophical orientations of judges nominated by the White House are decided when Americans elect their presidents.

The job of the Senate then is to decide not how a judge might rule in future cases but whether they're qualified jurists without taint of ethical or legal problems or some concealed radicalism.

But Alito's impending confirmation is attributable more than anything else to the Gang of Fourteen's compromise on judicial filibusters hammered out last May. In their deal, the senators all agreed that, barring "extraordinary circumstances," they would disallow a filibuster against any judicial nominee.

Their agreement has so far resulted in the successful confirmation of three controversial conservative lower court judges, along with newly-minted Chief Justice John Roberts and the soon-to-be-sworn-in Alito. Perhaps only Roberts would have been confirmed absent the Gang's agreement.

There is no way that President Bush could have gotten his way on those five nominations without the deal worked out by seven Republican and seven Democratic senators.

Like all the best legislative compromises in history, this deal required a canny combination of political shrewdness and enlightened concession to make it work.

I believe--and believed when the compromise was first forged--that Republicans were the biggest winners in the process, ensuring as they did that President Bush's conservative jurists would be confirmed.

But Democratic participants in the Gang of Fourteen deal also helped their own party, by presenting Democrats in the Senate with an opportunity to repudiate the futile ideological obstructionism that has given their party such a black eye in the past.

Senators from both parties also each showed respect for the history of the Senate, preserving the filibuster as a legislative maneuver unencumbered by the threat of the so-called "nuclear option." (As much as you may hate the filibuster and as often it has been used in the past by those attempting to obstruct national progress, particularly in the area of civil rights, director Frank Capra showed us how it can be used as tool for good in his film classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)

I first wrote about the need for a compromise on judicial filibustering eleven days before the Gang's deal was brokered and welcomed it when it came enthusiastically!

I hope that tonight, the President called every member of the Gang to thank them personally for ensuring that his nominees for the Court have had the fairest treatment since the Ford Administration.

Past Posts on This Subject:
Impending Compromise on Filibuster of Judicial Nominations (May 12, 2005)
Good To See Compromise on Judicial Nominations (May 23, 2005)
Bainbridge Has Good Insights into Filibuster Compromise (May 25, 2005)
Just My Opinion (May 31, 2005)
"I've Been Nominated for Membership in the National Geo...I Mean, the Coalition of the Chillin'" (June 2, 2005)