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WASHINGTON - Whether or not President Bush talks to Democrats about picking a new Supreme Court justice, New York's Sen. Chuck Schumer is going to have a lot to say about who ends up on the bench. Schumer, even though he is one of the more junior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has made himself a pointman for the Democrats on judges, becoming the ranking member of the subcommittee on courts, which gets first crack at the President's judge picks. The Brooklyn-based senator's judicial maneuvering has gotten the attention of friends and foes alike - even more than his...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The controversy over John Bolton would not affect his performance as the new US ambassador to the United Nations, even if President George W. Bush is forced to sidestep Congress and appoint him directly, the last person to hold the job said. "I don't think anybody at the United Nations cares whether Bolton is supported by 60 senators or 50 senators," John Danforth said. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri who stepped down as Washington's UN ambassador in January after seven months on the job, said UN diplomats only want to know if Bolton has the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, said on Thursday the White House had to provide information Democrats seek on U.N. nominee John Bolton by the end of the day or the nomination would be dead. "If they don't have (the documents) by the end of the day, it's finished," the Delaware Democrat said of the bitter dispute over President Bush's choice to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The White House accused Biden and other Democrats of not negotiating in good faith. "There have been many compromises offered, all of them...

DR. DEAN: I said I wasn't sure, but I said I thought there probably were. But the thing that really bothered me the most, which the 9-11 Commission said also wasn't true, is the insinuation that the president continues to make to this day that Osama bin Laden had something to do with supporting terrorists that attacked the United States. That is false. The 9-11 Commission, chaired by a Republican, said it was false.

Instead of a magic wand, Harry Reid uses his mouth. And in place of fighting on the side of good, Harry readily and passionately embraces the dark forces. As Senate Minority leader, Reid has already taken the Democrat art of obstructionism far beyond that of his predecessor Tom Daschle. And in a manner similar to the infamous and ongoing Howie Dean screams, no Republican is safe from his rantings and invented falsehoods. Harry’s once quick smile has turned into a leer and his demeanor has degraded to that of a permanently enraged and deranged man. Yikes! His apprentice training is...

WASHINGTON - Two of the Senate's senior statesmen, Republican John Warner and Democrat Robert Byrd, are stepping to the forefront of efforts to avert a showdown over whether an out-of-power party can use Senate filibusters to effectively thwart a president from reshaping the nation's courts to his liking. But time was running out on Byrd and Warner's attempt to bridge warring senatorial factions, with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., starting a countdown Friday on how long senators would debate Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen's nomination to the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. If senators are forced to...

Everyone except liberal Democrats are sick of the obstructionism practiced by Senate leftists on everything from the U.N. Ambassador to judgeships to other presidential appointees. They seem to be taking the startegy that the longer they stall, the closer they come to 2009 when there will be a new President (hopefully, in their minds, a Democrat president). Nobody envisioned the filibuster would turn into a de facto supermajority needed to confirm practically everybody the president sends up. The Republicans have talked about (as did Democrats back when they were the party in power) a "nuclear option" that would either scale...

The Senate on Wednesday kept up an investigation of John R. Bolton on the eve of a showdown vote on the troubled nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Democrats who claim he is too hotheaded or unbending say they could try to hold up a final vote in the full Senate. A Senate committee held private interviews with two State Department officials who worked with Bolton in his current job as the department's arms control chief. The Democrat who is leading the opposition to Bolton said he is asking the nominee directly for additional information. Republicans claimed...

Sen. Pryor Says He Will Join Sen. Harry Reid In Shutting Down The Senate If Liberals Lose Filibuster Vote Sen. Mark Pryor says he will join Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid in shutting down the Senate should liberals lose the vote to shut off their filibuster of judicial nominees. Pryor told the Associated Press, when asked if he would support Sen. Reid's retaliation: "I would only want to see us do that as a last resort. If that's what it comes to, that's what it comes to." Sen. Pryor's Washington office number is 202-224-2353. His District office in Little Rock...

(CNSNews.com) -- A liberal advocacy group is planning a week of rallies and protests - and a speech by former Vice President Al Gore - all blasting Republicans who want to eliminate Democrat filibusters of judicial nominees. As part of the effort to stop "radical Republicans" from taking "absolute control of the entire government," MoveOn.org's political action committee has unveiled a new TV ad featuring "lumbering" elephants eating federal court buildings. The ad says those "radical Republicans" are "planning to break the rules, eliminating checks and balances, to get more extremist judges approved." The Senate is expected to vote this...

WASHINGTON - In private talks with Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Senate's top Democrat has indicated a willingness to allow confirmation of at least two of President Bush's seven controversial appeals court nominees, but only as part of a broader compromise requiring Republicans to abandon threats to ban judicial filibusters, officials said Monday.At the same time he offers to clear two nominees to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals for approval, officials said Sen. Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., wants a third appointee to be replaced by an alternative who is preferred by Michigan's two Democratic senators.The officials...

"I just hope these people of Washington, D.C. are prepared to handle this. It's going to be a train wreck." WASHINGTON, D.C.: Those words, by that renowned political sage, Mike Tyson, are an apt description of what's been happening to Bush administration appointees in the U.S. Senate. Though the former heavyweight champion's comment is actually a forecast of his upcoming fight against Kevin McBride on June 11th at the MCI Center in Washington, it also applies to the current state of affairs between the White House and Capitol Hill. As a result, the very ambitious agenda President Bush has set...

The other day I entered a business establishment and overheard the following comments contained in a vitriolic, rabidly anti-American discussion. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought I was somewhere in “old Europe.” “They only did it for the oil...they don’t have an exit strategy...I have kids who are Draft age... this is really a mess.” If one hadn’t heard the same from Kerry (who was the other guy?) during the recent Democrat election debacle, the discussion might have come as a shock, but it didn’t. Still, it is incomprehensible that adult Americans, apart from blind stupidity or...

April 18, 2005 The Honorable Harry Reid S-221, The Capitol Washington, D.C. 20510 Dear Harry: I have reviewed your March 15, 2005 letter to Majority Leader Frist. While I certainly agree with your call to work together on the judicial nominations process, I am greatly concerned about your statement regarding shutting down Senate business and, by extension, the federal government. A government shut down would be rash and unwise, and the American people deserve better from us than such an act, which is surely inconsistent with "working together." I urge you to reconsider taking this action. We can all agree...

Some Senate Republicans are wisely beginning to cool on the "nuclear option" to end the Democrats' filibuster of a handful of President Bush's judicial nominees. The option is, by a simple-majority procedural vote, to ban judicial filibusters. It's called "nuclear" because it would vaporize a longstanding Senate prerogative - unlimited debate - and the fallout could be horrendous. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada has threatened to thoroughly gum up the workings of the Senate, which he can easily do, if the Republicans go ahead with the change. It takes a supermajority of 60 votes to end a filibuster,...

IN RECENT DAYS I interviewed Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, and Ralph Neas, executive director of People for the American Way. Together these two are the architects of the policy of unyielding obstruction by Democrats of George Bush's judicial nominees. It is difficult to overstate their influence on the Democratic caucus: They are widely considered to be the hands steering Democratic policy on judges. Both blew the usual rhetorical smoke about how well President Bush is doing with his judicial nominations--Bush has by far the lowest approval rate to the appeals court for modern times for a...

From Social Security, to intervention in the sad case of Terri Schiavo, to the appointment of conservative federal judges, every major debate positions the parties in the same way: Republicans are on offense, Democrats on defense. The debate on the federal budget isn't about whether to raise taxes to reduce the deficit, it's over how much more to cut taxes. Washington isn't examining how to expand coverage for those without health insurance, but whether to cut the Medicaid program that provides the central strand in our society's safety net. Democrats are furiously laboring to prevent Bush from carving out private...

If Americans of all ages ever recognize the degree to which they’ve been conned by the proponents of failed government programs such as Social Security, they will likely respond in a manner reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party. And it is not hard to imagine a few career politicians floating in the harbor alongside of King George’s cargo.,br> Consider the caterwauling from Democrats in response to President Bush’s efforts to reform Social Security. Originally promoted as merely a retirement supplement, Franklin Roosevelt’s scheme initially involved a minuscule payroll tax. Once implemented however, the road was clear to incrementally grow the...

In an impassioned plea to preserve the Senate filibuster, a recent New York Times editorial suggested that, because ‘majorities are temporary’, the Republicans should really reconsider using the so-called nuclear option of ending a filibuster. Superficially, this is true but this is actually the absolute opposite reason as to why the Democrats are really so desperate to retain the power to filibuster judicial nominees. Democrats, in fact, are supporting the filibuster precisely because they have every reason to believe that they will stay the minority party in the Senate for quite some time to come. Why? Because the GOP is...

In this world, those who can lead generally do, by default. Those who can’t lead usually follow, also by default. Those incapable of either become Democrats today… The operative words for all modern DNC initiatives are "dissent", "disorder" and "obstruct". That’s why their new party leader is the king of dissent Howard Dean. The more outrageous and obnoxious ones screams of dissent, the better their chances for a leadership roll in today’s DNC. The party has chosen to define itself by the 10 percent in America who don’t like anything about America, those who see America as the evil empire,...