Dole dives in

More filibuster nonsense... Bob Dole, who has occasionally come out of retirement to use his commerial-driven rehabilitated image as a funny old grandpa to shill for the right, joins the parade of conservatives stretching the truth, using highly selective data, and/or flat out lying about judicial filibusters.

I have already addressed some of his tired points elsewhere, the big one being the "Well-we-never-did-it" line that is utterly absurd given their previous actions on blue slips. However, Dole tosses a few more out that have been making the rounds of late...

President Bush has the lowest appellate-court confirmation rate of any modern president.

This is a great case of selective presentation of data... as mentioned previously, the Dems have acquiesed on 205 of 215 judicial nominations (the original post reads 214, but another has been confirmed since then). The 10 that have been blocked are all appellate court nominees and are the worst of the worst. During the Clinton years, the Republicans blocked some 60 nominees from 1995-1998, including a high number of circuit court judges. About 90 were left unconfirmed from 1995-2000, although some of those may have been confirmed since 2000.

But selective data aside, I am not even sure if Dole is even right on this... according to this right-wing site, Clinton had about 30% of his appellate court nominees blocked from 1995-2000, which is higher than W's approximately 20%. Where is Dole getting his numbers? Or is he just lying? Sadly, the NY Times doesn't seem to care much about the veracity of objective data on its op-ed pages, so I doubt they even checked it out.

Each of the 10 filibuster victims has been rated "qualified" or "well qualified"
by the American Bar Association.

This one is really kinda funny since the right has abolished previous protocol by steadfastly ignoring the ABA's opinions on judges (they used to be a formal part of the process, but have been cut out by the Bushies because they didn't appreciate their views on some of their nominees). This is like saying the UN doesn't matter while pointing to UN sanction violations as a reason to invade Iraq.

If the majority leader, Bill Frist, is unable to persuade the Democratic leadership to end its obstruction, he may move to change the Senate rules through majority vote. By doing so, he will be acting in accordance with Article I of the Constitution (which gives Congress the power to set its own rules) and consistently with the tradition of altering these rules by establishing new precedents.

This is deception and flat-out lying of the worst kind. Measures to amend Senate rules require a 2/3's majority vote to end cloture, higher than even the 60-vote standard for other cases (including judicial nominees). True, a change in Senate rules would be a simple majority, but they would never even get to that point due to the rules on cloture.

Nor do they ever plan on voting to change the rules... One of the reasons this would be "nuclear" is that they would be changing the rules without any vote... instead, Cheney, in his role as president of the senate, would declare the prevention of cloture on judicial nominees as "unconstitutional" thus effectively changing the rules by fiat. The majority vote that Dole is most likely referring to is the probable appeal by the Democrats on a point of order or some other question that would be resolved by a majority vote. This entire process is in direct violation of established Senate rules.

In fact, one of today's leading opponents of changing the Senate's rules, Senator Robert Byrd, was once a proponent of doing so, and on several occasions altered Senate rules through majoritarian means.

This is the latest line that is being passed around in Republican talking points during the past week or so, and it is really a bunch of rather unrelated crap produced by a right-wing law journal... for a detailed analysis to why this is all smoke and mirrors, see here. (Also note that the authors aren't just a couple random academics... Gold and Gupta are former Frist and Bush guys, respectively)

The real reasons they want to bring this up is more to tar the Democrats by involving the past uses of the filibuster, namely to prevent civil rights legislation (Byrd is a former member of the KKK and has since renounced his ways on those and related issues).

It is amazing how wild-eyed and urgent the right gets when it is being flayed by Mullah Dobson and the rest of his crew... even though they have bested the confirmation rates of all the recent presidents, they want more and more. When it all comes down to it, Josh is right... this isn't the nuclear option or the consitutional option or anything like that: it is the Crybaby Option.