ConfirmThem

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Roll Call has an article today about a looming compromise which would firmly establish a new precedent: a Senate minority would be allowed to veto majority-supported judicial nominations submitted by the President. According to the deal, the Senate would allow Democrats to continue filibustering three nominees, without even making it more difficult for the Democrats to conduct those filibusters (i.e. without enforcing the two-speech rule and without banning dilatory quorum calls). Here are excerpts from the Roll Call article:

A bipartisan coalition of Senators believe it is close to a deal ….The potential deal, spearheaded by Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) ….would commit to opposing the so-called nuclear option to end judicial filibusters….In exchange, the six Senate Democrats would pledge to allow votes on four of the seven circuit court nominees who were already filibustered in the 108th Congress and have been renominated. Perhaps more importantly, the six Democrats would pledge to vote for cloture to end filibuster attempts on all other judicial nominees named by President Bush, including Supreme Court picks, except in “extreme circumstances," according to a senior aide familiar with the discussions.
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“It’s very close," the aide said of the deal, requesting anonymity. The precarious deal — which would last at least through the 2006 elections — still hasn’t been finalized, and neither side would reveal who was a party to it.
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In remarks that went widely unnoticed in Washington, Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) told reporters in Little Rock on Thursday that he was working with Lott and Nelson on the deal. “It looks like there are a lot of Senators who want to avoid the nuclear option, and those are Senators on both the Republican and Democrat sides," Pryor told reporters attending the news conference.

The deal hinges on whether Republicans decide that they can trust the half-dozen Democrats to invoke cloture on all other nominees, and on how the Democrats define “extreme circumstances."
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The Lott-Nelson deal, however, would be in writing, and if Republicans eventually decided that the six Democratic signatories went back on their word by supporting unnecessary filibusters, they could presumably back out of the deal and tell Frist they were ready to support the nuclear option.
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Despite the negotiations, leadership aides on both sides continued to prepare for the showdown, with Republicans and Democrats planning a major communications onslaught this week.
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In the meantime, a conservative group, the National Coalition to End Filibusters, will host a press conference today at the National Press Club with a series of anti-filibuster speakers, including Hiram Lewis, a 2006 GOP Senate candidate against Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). Byrd, who has delivered a series of floor attacks against the nuclear option, has become a favorite target of conservatives.
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Democrats plan to bring to the Capitol this week a group of Princeton University students who have been holding a filibuster-style protest outside the Frist Campus Center, a building endowed by the Senate Majority Leader’s family. The Senator is a graduate of Princeton, where his son Harrison currently attends, and he has continued to be a large donor to the school….MoveOn ads are still running in Virginia, Maine, Oregon and Nebraska, targeting five swing GOP votes: Sens. John Warner (Va.), Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine), Gordon Smith (Oregon) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.).

Presumably, the three dumped nominees would be considered "extreme" enough to warrant a minority veto. In any event, future nominees to the Supreme Court would be even more vulnerable to a minority veto, because the minority could rightly argue that the nominees would not be subject to control by a higher court.

We already posted about the fact that Democrats consider three sitting Supreme Court justices to be "extreme." This deal would make it easier for fringe groups to shoot down both Supreme Court and Circuit Court nominees, because the fringe groups would have to convince fewer Senators than the 51 that has always been required in the past.