Posted on 01/27/2004 8:29:21 PM PST by Jean S
An internal GOP power struggle has emerged over how to handle President Bush’s controversial judicial nominees in the Senate.
The battle pits top aides in the Senate office of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs the judiciary panel, against more conservative staffers who work with the committee on nominations.
The struggle has come to light in the wake of an investigation by Bill Pickle, the Senate sergeant at arms, into the leak to the press of embarrassing internal Democratic Judiciary memos. Pickle plans to issue his report on the probe in the next several weeks. He gave an update on his progress to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) late yesterday afternoon.
Arrayed on one side are conservative staffers who are trusted aides to senators playing a leading role in the nomination fight. They are strongly committed to confirming Bush’s embattled nominees, who are being determinedly filibustered by the Democrats.
Ranged on the other side are several aides to Hatch who appear to have gained influence over the veteran chairman and the workings of the committee.
The outcome of this struggle is likely to influence how strenuously Senate Republicans push for confirmation and attempt to break the filibuster in the face of determined opposition from the liberal interest groups cited in the leaked memos.
Hatch’s acquiescence to the probe seems to have shifted control of the fight over judicial nominees from the leadership, whom conservatives had convinced to take an aggressive approach, to that of his personal office.
The conservatives’ ire has focused on Patricia Knight, the chief of staff in Hatch’s personal office, who conservative staffers say is now calling the shots at the Judiciary Committee.
“I’m pretty sure she’s no conservative,” said an aide who has worked extensively on the nominees.
Several Republican aides have said she has close relationships with key Democratic aides, citing alleged friendships with Mark Childress, a top aide to Daschle, and another unnamed top aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Knight worked closely with Daschle’s and Kennedy’s staffs in her prior assignment as Hatch’s top aide on health-related issues.
“The new chief counsel [of the committee] doesn’t have the stamina to put his foot down with the personal office,” said the aide, referring to Bruce Artim. The aide, who asked not to be identified by name, added: “Kennedy [has] influence on the personal staff, [and] the committee is being run by the personal staff at this point.”
Artim previously reported to Knight while he was handling healthcare issues on the judiciary panel. He took over the committee in July when former Chief Counsel and Staff Director Makan Delrahim, joined the U.S. Justice Department.
“No one has fought harder on Capitol Hill to get President Bush’s excellent judicial nominees confirmed than Chairman Hatch with his Chief Counsel Bruce Artim and the experienced and capable Judiciary Committee team. He will continue to work as hard as he can to accomplish this goal in this session of Congress,” said committee spokeswoman Margarita Tapia.
Several GOP staffers blame Knight for Hatch’s decision to allow Pickle to go forward with his investigation, which has resulted in the interview of more than 100 Senate aides and the seizure of four computer servers from the Judiciary Committee, as well as a computer from the majority leader’s office.
Aides say Knight helped prepare the public statement Hatch gave prior to Thanksgiving when he described himself as “mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch.”
However, many conservatives both inside and outside the Congress have decided that this statement improperly condemned Republican aides since, they say, the documents were not stolen but rather disclosed as the result of a computer glitch laid at the feet of a Democratic technician.
Press inquiries about the Pickle probe are directed from the committee to Hatch’s Senate office.
Many GOP aides resent Pickle’s probe. It has halted Republican progress in the battle over nominees that reached its height last year during a 40-hour marathon debate.
Now there is confusion about which nominees, if any, will come to the floor soon.
It has also obscured what GOP aides say is evidence contained in the Democratic memos that the same liberal special-interest groups that were cited in the memos have corrupted the nomination process.
The probe has already resulted in the resignation of a young aide whom Hatch suspended in November after he admitted accessing the memos on the Judiciary Committee server.
Democrats say the leaked files were hacked into, while Republicans say the files were easily accessed through their desktop computers through an unprotected desktop icon called “My Network Places.”
In addition, Frist informed The Boston Globe that Manuel Miranda, an aide who had run the fight on nominees, was on leave pending the results of the investigation.
Miranda, a former Judiciary Committee staffer, said he read the memos but did not leak them to the press.
Miranda’s defenders assert that neither reading those memos nor providing them to the media was a violation of law or Senate rules because there is no property right in a document on a government computer or network.
Senate rules prohibit the disclosure of only “information received in closed session, information obtained in confidential phases of investigations, and classified national security information,” Miranda’s defenders add.
Miranda said Hatch was “ill advised and spoke without knowing all the facts” when he made his pre-Thanksgiving statement, which seemed to give added momentum to Pickle’s investigation.
The investigation has reversed the gradual shift of control over nominations from the judiciary committee to the Senate leadership, which accelerated when Delrahim departed.
With Miranda gone, control over strategy on nominations has fallen almost entirely to the committee.
Meanwhile, conservatives want the focus to switch to the ethics of the memos. They have talked to outside groups about the filing complaints against Democrats with the Senate Ethics Committee.
Aides to Republican senators active in the battle over Bush’s judicial nominations and GOP-allied groups off the Hill have begun discussing the possibility of filing an ethics complaint against Judiciary Democrats.
“I think you’ll see a lot of ethics complaints filed against Democratic senators” because of evidence of impropriety contained in the memos, said a GOP aide familiar with those discussions.
The complaints would be based on the leaked memos and unpublicized memos now in the possession of the Capitol Police.
Key GOP Senate staffers charge that the Pickle investigation has run amok, extending far beyond its original scope of determining that accessed the memos.
A number of aides interviewed by Pickle’s agents say that the investigation has compiled information on the working relationships and processes of the GOP conference, as well as GOP strategy for confirming judges.
This is especially alarming in the eyes of GOP aides because Pickle will eventually give a comprehensive report of the investigation to Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and the arch foe of the blocked conservative judicial nominees.
Is that the gist of the article?
Heh. Frustrating, isn’t it.
Anyway, he’d better do whatever he intends to do before next January because he’s not going to be in a position to do it after that, IMO.
No other explanation is plausible.
The possibility???????? Filing ethics complaint should have come first!!!!
Pink pantied Hatch has always been a waste of time....all blow, no show.
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