By JEREMY W. PETERS
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s latest choice to fill
one of the vacancies on a powerful appeals court went down in a filibuster on
Tuesday as Senate Republicans blocked another White House nominee — the third in
two weeks — and deepened a growing conflict with Democrats over presidential
appointments.
By a vote of 56 to 41, the nomination of Cornelia T. L. Pillard, a Georgetown law professor, fell short of clearing the necessary 60-vote threshold.
Ms. Pillard’s liberal record on issues like abortion
has troubled many conservatives, who are concerned about her attaining a
position on a court widely considered second in stature to only the Supreme
Court. But Senate Republicans have tried to frame their opposition to her not in
terms of her views on social issues, instead focusing on the caseload at the
court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,
which is lower than that of other federal appeals courts.
The disagreements carried over onto the Senate floor
on Tuesday, as Democrats accused Republicans of blocking a perfectly qualified
woman for political purposes, while Republicans said Democrats were desperately
looking for a wedge issue.
Looming underneath their disagreements about Ms. Pillard is the likelihood — which appeared to grow considerably on Tuesday — that the fight will escalate and result in a change to the Senate rules to limit the minority party’s ability to filibuster judicial nominees.
Senator Richard J. Durbin, the chamber’s No. 2
Democrat, warned Republicans that they were pushing the Senate dangerously close
to a tipping point.
“There reaches a point where we can’t allow this type
of injustice to occur,” he said, all but threatening that Democrats would be
forced to change the rules. “It’s not fair to these nominees,” he added, “to be
given the back of the hand by a Republican filibuster on the floor of the United
States Senate.”
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who is a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, dared Democrats to change the rules, saying it would come back to haunt them if they lost the majority.
“Go ahead,” Mr. Grassley said. “There are a lot more
Scalias and Thomases that we’d love to put on the bench,” referring to Justices
Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court.
Democrats have made much of the fact that two of the
three nominees whom Republicans have rejected recently — and three of the
filibustered nominees the president has submitted for the District of Columbia
appeals court over the last year — were women. Mr. Grassley rejected the idea
that sex played any role in opposition to the nominees.
“When the other side runs out of legitimate arguments, their last line of defense is to accuse Republicans of opposing nominees based upon gender or race,” he said. “It’s a well-worn card. And they play it every time.”
The dispute has brought the Senate to the point of
crisis twice this year. But this latest round has become especially intense
because of the power of the court in question. It regularly decides cases that
determine whether White House-issued regulations are constitutional. Just last
week it ruled that the mandate in the Affordable Care Act for employers to
provide free coverage for contraception infringes on individual religious
liberty.
Social conservatives have seized on Ms. Pillard’s published writings on abortion and motherhood, in which she has staunchly defended a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy as constitutionally protected. One writer for The National Review Online called her “a pro-abortion extremist.”
The nomination of one more judge to the appeals court
could move to the Senate floor soon. Robert L. Wilkins, a Federal District Court
judge for the District of Columbia, has already cleared the Senate Judiciary
Committee and is awaiting a floor vote.
But Republicans have shown no willingness to approve him, either. Speaking after the vote on Tuesday, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he believed it had come to the point when Senate filibuster rules must be changed because Republicans were holding the president’s nominees to such “a blatant double standard.”
Slamming his fist on a lectern, he shouted, “Their
credibility is shredded!”
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