It's coming faster than originally thought according to today's New York Times:
Senior lawmakers and party officials said that while Republican leaders had been expected to put off any confrontation over Senate rules until next month at the earliest, they might now force a confrontation within the next two weeks.(that's my added emphasis)The reasons for the rush?
Frist is getting enormous pressure from the right wing nuts....yes, those same people who last week had a conference calling for mass impeachment of judges, claimed there is no independent judiciary and invoked Stalinist techniques to "solve" the problem which was reported in last Saturday's Washington Post story about the "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" conference. That whole article is worth a read, but this was the most bizarre and frightening excerpt:
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."So, that's who Frist is letting set the GOP agenda these days. And in the Senate, Ricky Santorum is leading the charge according to today's NY Times:
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.
Among those pushing for the change is Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, No. 3 in the Republican leadership.Um, Ricky, your colleagues and advocates are talking violence against judges. They are threatening judges with impeachment and worse. In the real world, that's the kind of rhetoric which is "out of control and counterproductive." And, Ricky, you and Frist and the rest of your colleagues are inciting and inflaming the craziness with the nuclear option.
"I am concerned that a partisan minority of Democrats are threatening to shut down the Senate if Republicans act to restore Senate tradition for simple majority votes" on nominations to the bench, Mr. Santorum said. "Their rhetoric is out of control and counterproductive."
