Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON, Apr 28 2005 (IPS) — U.S. voters are rallying around an unusual movement to support a politician’s right to make apparently endless speeches.

At issue is the filibuster, a time-honoured parliamentary tactic of using lengthy oration to stall a vote on contentious proposals.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is seeking to eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, deriding the practice as unfair because it enables minority Democrats to block Republican initiatives – chiefly, President George W. Bush’s nominees to federal judgeships.

Known as the ”nuclear option,” Frist’s proposed change in Senate rules would require only a simple 51-vote majority in the 100-seat chamber to close debate and move to a vote on the judges. Current rules require 60 votes to close the debate. This means that if the majority cannot muster 60 votes, the minority can keep talking in hopes of wearing down the other side.

Senate Democrats and some members of Frist’s Republican Party oppose the ”nuclear option.” They say the speechifying represents an integral part of the U.S. system of checks and balances, designed to prevent any one branch of government from overreaching its bounds and to ensure that legislative minorities can temper what otherwise might be one-sided measures enacted by the majority.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that some six in 10 U.S. voters opposed breaking the 200-plus year old Senate rules to usher through judicial nominees.

More is at stake than an arcane parliamentary procedure or a politician’s license to hold forth interminably, said Susan Norton, a representative of the National Council of Jewish Women who travelled to Washington Wednesday with voters from her home in Omaha, Nebraska, in the country’s Midwest, to urge U.S. senators to support the filibuster.

”The majority may rule but the minority must never be without voice and power and influence,” Norton told IPS, adding: ”People like me want to have a say because we can have a say. That truly is the beauty and the miracle of a representative democracy and so I like to exercise the voice that I have.”

With a number of lifetime appointments to the federal appeals court – the nation’s second highest court – and possibly to the U.S. Supreme Court hanging in the balance, the filibuster has drawn support from a broad coalition of groups working on issues ranging from the treatment of workers and blacks to reproductive rights, freedom of religious expression, and the environment.

”Decisions are made every day by our federal courts that affect the rights that we as ordinary citizens have, whether it be in terms of our everyday lives, our access to employment opportunities, our access to health care, exercising our religious freedoms and choices, and choices that affect our bodies,” said Norton, a lawyer who gave up her job to raise four sons now aged between three and eight.

Wednesday’s lobbying effort involved some 35 voters from Nebraska and five other states whose senators had yet to decide or declare their position on the filibuster, said Mistique Cano, a spokeswoman for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). There are two senators for each of the 50 U.S. states.

LCCR is prominent among some 140 groups assembled under the banner of the Coalition for a Fair and Independent Judiciary, which has sponsored a steady stream of lobbying visits to Senate offices.

Coalition members oppose a handful of Bush’s judicial nominees, whom they describe as outside the U.S. mainstream because the candidates have expressed views, handed down decisions, or been snarled in controversies that critics say reveal political, religious, or ethnic biases inconsistent with judicial impartiality and the dictates of equal protection under the law.

”These nominees would take us back to the days of segregation,” said Rev. Robert Shine, pastor of Berachah Baptist Church in the eastern city of Philadelphia. Shine lobbied his state’s senators Wednesday on behalf of the Black Clergy of the State of Pennsylvania network.

Eleanor Smeal, president of coalition member Feminist Majority, invoked similar fears on behalf of her constituents.

”For women this could be catastrophic, because we stand to lose the gains of the last 40 years, especially our right to reproductive choice and our hard-won protections against sex discrimination,” Smeal said in a statement.

Democrats last year blocked 10 of Bush’s nominees by threatening to filibuster them, meaning they would need 60 votes in order to win Senate confirmation to lifetime appellate court seats. They have threatened to block again the seven that Bush re-nominated this year.

Frist in turn has threatened to use the Senate’s Republican majority to introduce the ”nuclear option,” in part because Republicans fear that Democratic stalling also could bedevil administration efforts to fill a Supreme Court vacancy were one to open during Bush’s second term.

Democrats offered a compromise in which they reportedly would drop objections to some of Bush’s nominees in exchange for promises that Republicans would not eliminate the filibuster but Frist rebuffed them Tuesday.

The Senate majority leader also has sought to mobilise conservative evangelical churches and other supporters to counter the opponents’ popular lobbying campaign.

Republicans and Democrats traditionally have battled over judicial confirmations. Even so, ”the Senate has confirmed the overwhelming majority of President Bush’s judicial nominees, 205 so far,” said John Sweeney, president of the 13-million-member AFL-CIO labour federation.

The current skirmishes likely will move from Washington to the local front next week, when senators return to their home states for a break.

In Omaha, they will find Norton waiting for them. ”The best way for them to represent me is to know how I feel,” she said.