Senator Schumer cries: "Where's my spotlight?!?"

On election night in November 2000, my buddy from Long Island moaned in anguish when Hillary Clinton won the New York Senate seat vacated by Pat Moynihan. Later (after he had calmed down) he said: "This is going to kill Schumer…that guy always wants to be on the news and now he's going to be upstaged by the junior senator."

Now Chuck Schumer's back to his old microphone-grabbing ways, upset and shocked that Bush would renominate Charles Pickering to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals after he was rejected in committee on a straight party line vote by the Democrats. Republicans believed that the nomination would have passed the full Senate, so the partisan vote in committee was a way to keep a conservative judge off the bench. But now the Republicans are back in control, and it's time to give Judge Pickering his chance. Senator Schumer, in high dudgeon, is vowing a filibuster.

Schumer comforts himself and welcomes the moral media circus because he does not believe in the long-standing "advise and consent" role of the Senate to appoint federal judges. Instead, he has made it clear since Bush took office (yet not before) that ideology should be considered in judicial nominees, and not necessarily judicial competence. In this June 2001 press release, Schumer notes:

Schumer said the stigma attached to using ideology as a consideration in evaluating nominees to the federal bench since the nomination of Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court in 1987 has led to an "escalating war of gotcha politics over nominations that has warped the confirmation process and harmed the Senate's reputation," and called for an open and rational consideration of a nominee's ideology.
Schumer also said the Senate is responsible for ensuring the federal bench does not tilt too far in either ideological direction, justifying opposition to nominees whose views fall outside the mainstream and have been selected to push the bench in one ideological direction.
"This era, perhaps more than any other before, calls out for collaboration between the President and the Senate in judicial appointments," said Schumer. "It certainly justifies Senate opposition to judicial nominees whose views fall outside the mainstream and have been selected to further tilt the courts in an ideological direction."

Nice use of the passive voice there: the "stigma" that somebody (I don't remember) attached to the Bork nomination. Also, note "this era" – the era of a Republican in the White House obviously. Schumer's doublespeak simply means that how well a nominee adheres to the law is secondary to him – he must be "in the mainstream" and we know what that means.

This twisting of Constitutional duty was on further display back in May 2002, when Schumer tried to sink the nomination of D. Brooks Smith who was up for the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. As Byron York of the National Review noted at the time, it wasn't enough for the Senator that Smith said he would "follow the law"; Smith had to show allegiance to Schumer's interpretation of "good law".

"Schumer's letter is disturbing to Republicans because it seems to move the examination of judicial nominees into new territory. Under what may become a new test for judicial nominees, it is no longer enough for a candidate to swear that he will follow the law; he instead has to say he believes that certain laws — Griswold, Roe, and a few others — are good and well-reasoned laws. "Schumer wants to get Smith to say that he personally feels the Griswold decision is the right decision," says one key GOP aide. "Trouble is, any good jurist would have difficulty making that statement. A good jurist would argue that stare decisis [the authority of established legal precedent] applies. But it's another thing to ask whether a judge would have come up with the same decision under the same circumstances."

Senator Schumer, working on maybe 30% principle and 70% spotlight-grabbing, is doing a grave disservice to the Senate and the country. My only hope is that some of the damage backfires onto him and the Democrats, who have played these games more than once too often.