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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Most popular histories of Congress include an exchange, very likely apocryphal, in which Washington and Jefferson discuss the difference between the House and the Senate. "Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?" Washington asks. "To cool it," Jefferson replies. "Even so," Washington says, "we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it." For Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat and a senator since 1973, the Senate remains a place where "you can always slow things down and make sure that a minority gets a voice," he said recently. And, he added, "the chance to filibuster"--using extended debate in order to block legislation--"is what makes the difference between this body and the other one." It takes three-fifths of the Senate--or sixty senators--to break a filibuster. (The cloture rule, as it is known, has been in effect since 1917; before 1975, it took a two-thirds vote to end a debate.) But the filibuster rule may soon be altered in a dramatic way, and the Senate itself may change along with it.
The precipitating factor is a continuing controversy over President Bush's judicial selections. Although more than two hundred of Bush's nominees were approved by the Senate in the past four years, Democrats used the filibuster to stop ten appellate-court choices. As a result, some Republicans are pushing to alter the Senate's rules so that a simple majority could cut off debate on judicial nominees. With the Senate now split fifty-five to forty-four (with one independent) in favor of the Republicans, the change could render the Democrats almost powerless to stop Bush's choices, including nominees to the United States Supreme Court. The magnitude of this transformation of the rules is suggested by the nickname it has acquired within the Senate: the "nuclear option."
The man at the center of the controversy over judicial nominations is Senator Arlen Specter, who also, as it happens, reflects the broader transformation of the Senate itself. Specter, of Pennsylvania, was elected in 1980. These days, in his office overlooking the Supreme Court, he surveys, not happily, the current state of his party--especially the disappearance of moderates like him. "We had a lot of senators," he said. "We could go on and on and on," and he named, as examples of this group, Bob Packwood, Mark Hatfield, Lowell Weicker, Charles Mathias, and John Heinz. "And we don't have them now. So it's not good for the Party, and it's not good for the country. It's not good for the Party because you need balance. You need to be a national party." Since 1980, the year of the Ronald Reagan landslide, moderate Republicans have been a vanishing species.
Specter's election, last year, to his fifth term showed how estranged he had grown from much of his own party. In an abrasive Republican primary, one in which Bush campaigned for him, Specter barely defeated a conservative challenger; but he won by eleven per cent in the general election, in a state carried by John Kerry. On November 3rd, the day after the election, a reporter asked Specter about possible Supreme Court nominees, an issue that had fresh importance because Specter, a longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was finally in line to become its chairman and thus the steward of Bush's judicial appointments. Repeating a view that he had expressed many times, Specter said that he regarded the protection of abortion rights, established by Roe v. Wade, as "inviolate," and he suggested that "nobody can be confirmed today" who disagrees with that opinion. Virtually overnight, the conservative groups that had supported the primary challenge against Specter, such as Focus on the Family, demanded that he be denied the chairmanship.
The...
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