And Then I Found Five Dollars: Sen. Bill Frist’s all-night slumber party

I understand that most Boston University students don’t get cable, so that’s why I shouldn’t be shocked that few people on campus had the pleasure of watching the United States Senate’s 39 hours of uninterrupted debate on C-SPAN last week, or, as I’m now calling it, Sen. Bill Frist’s slumber party.

I love debate. In fact, I probably love it a little too much. Forget the notion of using debate as a tool to improve dialogue between two competing ideologies I prefer to look at debate as a formal way of proving that you aren’t just right in every sense of the word, but that your counterparts are so wrong and uninformed that they should be ashamed of themselves. Interestingly, it seems Senate Republicans would agree with me on the latter.

But why did the Republicans feel it so necessary to call out their foes from the left side of the political aisle? Last year, the Republicans took control of the Senate by a slim 51-48 margin, with Vermont’s Jim Jeffords as the only independent. This meant that some Bush judicial nominees would now come to the floor for a confirmation vote … or so thought the Senate Republican conference.

Turns out the Democrats weren’t going to sit idly by and let these nominees assume their respective positions on the appellate and circuit court benches. They employed the often hated but always entertaining senatorial move of filibustering. While not as dramatic as Jimmy Stewart’s fictional filibuster in ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ it was equally effective. In the Senate, the majority needs 60 votes to invoke cloture, which means all debate on a matter is essentially over (they may allow for a set time left to argue) and that Senators can now cast their vote on whatever the issue is.

Unlike when Stewart’s character of Mr. Smith stalwartly stood up for hours on end in Frank Capra’s pretend Senate, this filibuster has been less dramatic and equally irritating. Several times over the past nine months, Republicans have called for cloture votes to end debate on the confirmation of four judicial nominees. The Democrats (with the exception of two) have said with a slight political smirk, ‘Nope, we want to keep discussing this guy/girl.’

This went back and forth for months. Republicans called Democrats obstructionists, while Democrats stood back and proclaimed that they’ve confirmed 168 of Bush’s nominees. I had an interesting seat to watch this ongoing debate, as an intern for South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle, the Senate Minority Leader and the man whose call it was to start the filibuster. Now excuse me while I tilt toward the left before I write the rest of this column.

The first to be filibustered was Miguel Estrada, who was up for a seat on the Washington, D.C. circuit court, a position generally regarded as a precursor to the Supreme Court. Estrada is Hispanic, so the GOP claimed that Democrats didn’t want any conservative minorities on the bench and Daschle’s office was flooded with phone calls from people who called my boss and me racist. We even got a fax that read, ‘Confirm Estrada you racist gringos!’ Thank you, Karl Rove and company, but I guess you guys forgot that the Senate has confirmed about a half-dozen Hispanic Bush judges already.

The reasons given for Estrada’s filibuster were his refusal to answer several questions during his confirmation hearing and his apparent inability to hand over documents from his time in the Solicitor General’s Office. He’s also an ultra-conservative right-winger who would judge abortion cases, affirmative action cases, union cases and civil rights cases on the basis of his conservative ideals, not precedence. So Democrats blocked him, Estrada withdrew his name, Frist got mad, Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum got dumber and President George W. Bush got a lesson in what ‘advice and consent’ actually meant. The Democrats did the same thing to three more nominees.

This brings us to last week. Frist was under pressure from the White House to hammer down the Democrats and hey, what better way to do that then by staging a two-day gab-a-thon. During the debate, I heard the same arguments;, Republicans kept up their mantra of a need for an ‘up or down vote’ while Democrats brought out large placards featuring big numbers reading 168. Meanwhile, Frist posed for cameras in an army-style cot in the hallways of the Senate (strange, considering he has several comfortable sofas in his office).

To put it bluntly: this really is all the Republicans’ fault. The reason there are hundreds of empty seats on appellate and circuit court benches is because when Clinton was president, his nominees were on several occasions not allowed out of committee and many times not even given a confirmation hearing (anyone from Utah can write to complain to Orrin Hatch, cause he’s the chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee and not a very nice man). That being said ,you can be sure that the next time Republicans are in the minority and there’s a Democratic president (fingers crossed), they are going to filibuster more than just handful of judges. In short, the political divide is going to get wider and uglier before it gets better.