Good article on the fight over judges - Vanity Fair Dec. issue

[kskiska]

This isn't available online, but if you're interested, it's a good read. It explains how the Democrats have managed to stick together to filibuster these judges.

Bush's Court Advantage
By David Margolick

This past spring, Senate minority leader Tom Daschle and Senator Edward Kennedy invited Robert Caro, who had just published the third volume of a projected four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, to talk to a group of Senate Democrats. The war with President Bush over the direction of the federal judiciary was intensifying and the Democrats had launched filibusters against a few of those candidates they considered most right-wing and retrograde. But the Democratic coalition was shaky, and the shakiest among them were several younger senators. Like everyone else, they’d heard Republican accumationa that the “process is broken” and that the Democrats had done the breaking; they feared that they were in fact violating Senate traditions and fundamentally changing the confirmation process. They needed reassurance.

Having read Master of the Senate, the latest installment of the Johnson biography, Daschle and Kennedy knew that Caro was the man to provide it. For sev&ral hours, as the group sat around a rectangular table in an elaborate room near the Senate press gallery, Caro delivered a combination history seminar and pep talk. He told his audience—lO or 12 senators, along with many of their staffers—that, far from some kind of deviant obstructionism, the robust resistance the Democrats were offering was precisely the “advice and consent” the Constitution demanded. Indeed, if they did not exercise these powers, he said, they would be allowing the balance among the branches envisioned by the Founders to shift: power over court selections would migrate permanently to the presidency, much the way the power to make war already had. And once given away, he said, those powers would be extremely difficult to reclaim.
Emboldened by what Caro told them, the Democratic resistance held, even stiffened. In fact, Democrats now stand poised to block more of Bush’s choices.

(much more in magazine)