News Intelligence Analysis
From the New York Times
March 18, 2005
Split Panel Sends Renominated
Candidate to Full Senate
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, March 17 - Voting along strict party lines, the Senate
Judiciary Committee approved the first of President Bush's appeals
court nominees on Thursday, hastening the Senate's march to a
large-scale partisan breakdown.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is the committee's chairman, urged the panel's Democrats not to waste time attacking the candidate, William G. Myers III. "We all know the outcome will be on party lines," Mr. Specter said.
And so it was, with all 10 Republicans on the committee voting to send the nomination to the floor and all 8 Democrats voting against that.
But before that vote, the committee's Democrats pointedly declined to heed Mr. Specter's plea for brevity, if not silence. Instead, they criticized at length the Myers nomination, which they characterized as part of an effort by President Bush to pack the nation's courts with right-wing ideologues.
Mr. Myers, who spent much of his career lobbying for mining and ranching industries, has a long record of pungent criticism of the environmental movement and especially federal environmental laws. He was a leading voice in the "sagebrush rebellion" in which large Western landowners deplored federal regulators. He once said that federal environmental regulations were akin to George III's tyranny over the American colonies.
"This is the most antienvironmental judicial nominee I have ever seen in my years in the Senate," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking Democrat.
Besides using Mr. Myers's own comments to pummel him, Democrats noted that some of his decisions as chief lawyer in the Interior Department in Mr. Bush's first term were heavily tilted to the mining interests that once employed him.
At the Interior Department, he once drafted a ruling allowing a foreign-owned gold mine to be established on Indian land in California. A federal judge later ruled that Mr. Myers's opinion misconstrued the "clear mandate" of a federal law that, the judge said, was intended to prevent degradation of land.
The regulations that Mr. Myers upheld, the judge wrote, typically "prioritize the interests of miners, who seek to conduct these mining operations over the interests of persons such as plaintiffs," who as environmentalists "seek to conserve and protect the public lands."
Mr. Myers's nomination has been opposed by almost all major environmental groups as well as many groups representing American Indian interests. Mr. Myers, who has little courtroom experience, received a mixed rating from the American Bar Association committee that evaluates judicial nominees, though a majority rated him qualified.
Democrats used a filibuster to block Mr. Myers's initial nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine Western states. Though the Republicans then had 51 Senate votes, a slim majority, they needed 60 votes to break a filibuster.
With the Republicans' Senate ranks now strengthened to 55, Mr. Bush renominated Mr. Myers, along with six other judicial candidates who had been blocked by filibuster in his first term.
Mr. Myers is poised to be the first appellate-court nominee to come before the Senate in Mr. Bush's second term. Democrats seem prepared to filibuster the nomination again.
The committee's approval Thursday was only a small act in a larger political drama. Republicans say they are outraged at the use of the filibusters to block Bush judicial candidates. Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, has raised the possibility that he will force a rules change, prohibiting the use of filibusters for judicial nominations. On Thursday, though, he appeared to signal a willingness to compromise, saying he hoped the two parties could find reasonable alternatives to changing the rules.
His Democratic counterpart, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who has said that his party would respond to a rules change by bringing all but the most essential Senate business to a halt, said Thursday he was encouraged by Mr. Frist's remarks.
Mr. Specter has tried to broker a compromise to avoid a partisan meltdown of the Senate. He proposed Mr. Myers as the first nominee to face a full Senate vote, hoping to draw enough Democratic votes to end the threat of a filibuster. But it has become evident that Mr. Specter may have chosen the wrong horse; Democrats seem unwilling to budge on the Myers nomination.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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