Senate GOP Sets Up Filibuster Showdown
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has threatened to change Senate rules to ban filibusters for judicial nominations, clearing the way for them to be confirmed by a simple majority vote. But Democrats have threatened to bring the Senate to a virtual halt if Frist invokes what has been called the "nuclear option" on such nominations.
Republicans carefully chose their nominees for a Senate confrontation that could occur sometime in the next month, assuming that they can put Democrats, who pride themselves on appealing to female and black voters, on the defensive if they attempt again to deny two women, one of them an African American, an up-or-down vote.
But Democrats long have argued that race and sex aside, Owen and Brown are conservative ideologues whose views and writings make them unfit to serve in such sensitive, lifetime positions. Brown has said active governments lead to "a debased, debauched culture." Owen signed an opinion on abortion that drew a sharp rebuke from the man who now is Bush's attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales.
"We're in the ramp-up to a great constitutional crisis," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (news, bio, voting record) (D-N.Y.) said.
Lawmakers said yesterday's committee vote removed any doubts that Senate GOP leaders are closing in on their threat to change the chamber's rules and ban filibusters of judicial nominees.

Republicans said voters will punish Democrats if they bog down the Senate and kill energy bills, spending measures and other potentially popular items. But Democrats said Republicans, especially Bush, are to blame for renominating the two women and other appellate court nominees who were blocked by filibusters in his first term.
"President Bush is responsible for the ill will that has plagued this body for the past few years and the potentially disastrous upending of Senate precedents that we may soon see," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.).
Owen, a Texas Supreme Court justice, and Brown, a California Supreme Court justice, have solid conservative records and histories of making colorful remarks, which liberal groups have attacked for years. Democrats said their records, and nothing else, make them unsuitable for federal appellate court seats. "No one can seriously believe that objections to Justice Brown's nomination are motivated by racial or gender prejudice," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Kennedy and others recited the most controversial of Brown's and Owen's statements and rulings. For instance, Brown said in an April 2000 speech, "where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. . . . The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining, and virtue contemptible."
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