Think Progress has a great post up detailing a senatorial smackdown of Bill “Cat Killer” Frist by my other, other, other, other new favorite elected official, Charles Schumer (D-NY).

This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

Here was Frist’s response:

The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination – we’ll come back and discuss this further. – Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe – a point – and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

So, Frist is arguing that one filibuster is OK. His problem is that several Bush nominees have been filibustered. This position completely undercuts Frist’s argument that judicial filibusters are unconstitutional. (Which is, in turn, the justification for the nuclear option.) If judicial filibusters are unconstitutional there is no freebee. But Frist digs his hole even deeper:

The issue is not cloture votes per se, it’s the partisan, leadership-led use of cloture votes to kill – to defeat – to assassinate these nominees. That’s the difference. Cloture has been used in the past on this floor to postpone, to get more info, to ask further questions.

When Frist voted to filibuster Paez’s nomination it had been pending for four years. It’s hard to believe he couldn’t get all the info he needed or ask all the questions he had during that time. Make no mistake about it: Bill Frist was trying to kill the Paez nomination.

And that was fun enough, but then in the comments, some wingnut troll called “Brandon Greenberg” pipes in with:

Where is Paez sitting now.. he is sitting one the court because he got a up or down vote you commies…

…and I was gettin’ all prepared to write the perfect rebuttal when “Arnold P. California” beat me to it:

Regarding the “well, Paez did get a vote” argument: Folks have shot it down for the obvious reason, viz., that the fact that Frist’s attempt to block an up-or-down vote via filibuster failed doesn’t change the fact that he tried to do something that he now claims to be unconstitutional.

But there’s another point. Paez had been waiting for 4 years. Fletcher, another 9th Circuit judge, waited for 4 years. When Clinton’s nominees *did* get floor votes, it was often only after GOP senators did their damndest to stop them.

Remember when Miguel Estrada withdrew, and the GOP shouted racism? Apparently, they had forgotten about the several Latino circuit court nominees under Clinton who had to withdraw – a couple after waiting for several years for a vote – because of GOP refusal to allow a vote.

And the idea that it’s unconstitutional for 40 senators to deny a floor vote is tremendously silly next to the fact that the GOP allowed *one* senator to block nominees during the Clinton years. Under the “blue slip” rule, any senator could block even a Judiciary Committee hearing on a nominee from his state. Jesse Helms blocked every single North Carolina nominee to the 4th Circuit for 8 years. And he wasn’t the only one. A 6th Circuit nominee appointed during Clinton’s *first* term was still waiting for the sacred up-or-down vote at the end of his second term. (When the GOP took back the Senate in 2002, the first thing Hatch did was change the blue-slip rule). In a lot of cases, Hatch simply didn’t schedule a hearing for the nominee. Or he didn’t schedule a committee vote. Or, after the nominee was voted out of committee, the GOP majority didn’t schedule a floor vote. No need to filibuster if the up-or-down vote never happens.

In all, more than 60 Clinton nominees were still waiting for a vote when Clinton left office, and that doesn’t count the ones whose nominations had been withdrawn.

The strategy then was obvious: keep seats open at all costs so that a GOP president could fill them. Occasionally, the nominee was someone the GOP opposed on ideological grounds, e.g., they were worried about Fletcher because his mother has been a liberal on the 9th Circuit. But for the most part, the Clinton nominees were a pretty tame lot (unlike Carter’s circuit court nominees, such as Fletcher’s mother and her colleague on the 9th Circuit, Stepehen Reinhardt).

There were officially declared judicial emergencies on several circuits, so that your appeal was often heard by a three-judge panel that included only *one* active judge from that circuit. The situation was so bad that Rehnquist – no liberal activist he – chided the senate in one of his year-end state-of-the-judiciary letters and told them to vote yea or nay, but hurry up and vote, dammit! But that was the strategy – keep tons of seats open so that, should the GOP win the White House in 2000, the new president could appoint enough Federalist Society types, along with the Reagan and Bush I nominees, to dominate the courts. And you know what? They do: the 6th is pretty much split down the middle and the 9th has so many judges that it’s all over the place depending on which 3 you draw; but otherwise, every circuit has a solid majority of conservatives. As for the claim that there is *now* an emergency, don’t make me laugh; the number of vacancies is much, much lower than it was under Clinton, when the GOP didn’t seem to think there was any rush, plus which Bush himself has failed to nominate anyone for a couple of dozen (mostly district court) seats, so even the number of vacancies that do exist are mostly his fault.

Personally, I have a great deal of trouble with the idea of filibustering judicial nominees. I hope that somehow, some way, once this battle is over, we will get to a healthier process for Democratic and Republican presidential appointees alike. But the GOP (Frist in particular) really has no defense to the charge of hypocrisy on this issue.

In short: Brandon Greenberg, you’re an idiot. Not only is your argument illogical on its face, but your ignorance of the historical facts is apparent. Don’t shoot off your mouth in public when you don’t know what you’re talking about, son. To repeat: You are an idiot.

Well said.