Arguing that Democratic filibusters are “unprecedented,” Senate Republicans have been attacking their practice in order to clear the path for President Bush’s ultra-conservative judicial nominees. It should be noted that Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch is using the word “unprecedented” in an entirely new way–one curiously free of historic fact. Otherwise he might have to take into account that Senate Republicans blocked dozens of the Clinton administration’s Democratic nominees with much less open and accountable procedures, like secret holds. In particular, Hatch defended a Republican-led filibuster in 1994 on a judicial nomination, declaring the filibuster “one of the few tools the minority has to protect itself and those the minority represents.”
Senate Democrats have used the filibuster for only 10 of Bush’s 204 judicial nominees, while one-third of Clinton’s appeals court nominees from 1995 through 2000 were kept off the bench, some delayed for as long as four years.
So when Hatch classifies the use of filibusters as “unfair, dangerous, partisan and unconstitutional,” and says they create a “constitutional crisis,” he is succumbing to a particularly pitiable brand of hypocrisy.
(via AlterNet)