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Voting 59 to 39, the U.S. Senate today confirmed David Hamilton’s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
The Hamilton nomination stalled for five months amid criticism from Republican lawmakers about Hamilton’s pro bono work for the Indiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Earlier this week, the Republican caucus fell short of maintaining a filibuster.
“This is a nomination that should be confirmed and should have been confirmed months ago. David Hamilton is a fine judge and will make a good addition to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement.
In their quest to thwart President Obama, Republicans do not fear the hobgoblin of consistency.
For much of this decade, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, now the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, led the fight against Democratic filibusters of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees.
So now a Democratic president is in the White House and he has nominated his first appellate judicial nominee, U.S. District Judge David Hamilton. And what did Sessions do? He went to the floor and led a filibuster.
“I opposed filibusters before,” the Alabaman said with his trademark twang. But in this case, he went on, “I don’t agree with his judicial philosophy. Therefore, I believe this side cannot acquiesce into a philosophy that says that Democratic presidents can get their judges confirmed with 50 votes.”
UH-HUH
Ten of the Senate’s 40 Republicans, attempting some measure of consistency, parted ways with Sessions and voted with Democrats in a resounding 70 to 29 vote to break the filibuster. But the rest abandoned their deeply held views of just a few years ago.
There was, for example, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Back in 2005, he demanded “a simple up-or-down vote” for nominees …
On Tuesday, McConnell voted to sustain the filibuster.
There was also Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.), who in 2005 gave his considered opinion that “neither filibusters nor supermajority requirements have any place in the confirmation process.”
On Tuesday, Brownback voted in favor of filibusters.
And there was Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), who warned four years ago that “if the filibuster becomes an institutional response where 40 senators driven by special interest groups declare war on nominees in the future, the consequence will be that the judiciary will be destroyed over time.”
On Tuesday, Graham voted to institutionalize the filibuster.
- “You know that every measure, virtually every measure with any degree of controversy about it in the United States Senate requires 60 votes. That’s the ordinary procedure, not the unusual.”
—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, CNN “Late Edition,” January 14, 2007
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."