How Democrats Stoked Partisanship In Confirmation Process

For Democrats railing against the Senate’s threat to mothball President Obama’s nominees to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Republicans have three words: You started it.

From the ruthless attacks on Judge Robert Bork to the 28-month filibuster of Miguel Estrada and the nine other filibusters of judicial nominees by President George W. Bush, conservatives say Senate Democrats have led the charge in an increasingly partisan confirmation process.

“Harry Reid, Joe Biden, President Obama and their fellow Democrats are the ones who broke the process in the first place, and if they don’t like that the GOP is holding up the process, they’re just reaping what they sowed,” said Mark Hemingway in a Wednesday op-ed in The Weekly Standard.

Vice President Joe Biden is often credited with ushering in the newly hostile climate when, as chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, he presided over the then-unprecedented savaging of Judge Robert Bork, President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 nominee to the Supreme Court, during confirmation hearings.

A few years later, Mr. Estrada’s nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was blocked for 28 months by Senate Democrats before he finally withdrew from consideration in 2003. An internal memo by Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin’s staff unearthed shortly thereafter said Mr. Estrada was “especially dangerous” because “he is Latino.”

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