WASHINGTON — When the dust clears after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, all eyes on Capitol Hill will turn to the Senate's relatively new majority leader and nascent presidential candidate: Bill Frist of Tennessee.
It is Frist who will decide whether and when Senate Republicans will seek a rule change to prevent Democrats from using the filibuster to block federal judicial nominees -- a move so politically explosive it has been dubbed the "nuclear option."
And as both sides calculate the political risks and benefits of the battle over judges, they are focused not just on the merits of the debate but on Frist's presidential prospects.
"The first, second and third factor for Bill Frist is his presidential aspiration," said Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Wittmann, who works for the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist party group, thinks Frist has little choice. "He has to pull the trigger [on the filibuster fight]. He cannot back down or he will be viewed as a wimp by the Republican right."
The battle lines for the confrontation will be largely set after today, when the Judiciary Committee is expected to vote to send two of President Bush's more controversial nominees for the federal bench to the Senate floor for confirmation. California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla R. Owen have been previously filibustered by Democrats. And party leaders have signaled they will try to block them again.
Frist will in effect sound the battle horn as soon as he puts one of them on the schedule for debate. Before that, he is expected to make an overture to Democrats -- a kind of "one last chance" for peace. But neither side expects he can offer a gesture acceptable to Democrats.
It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster, meaning a minority of 41 senators can block a vote on an issue they expect to lose. In recent years, Democrats have drawn on the filibuster to block 10 of Bush's 205 judicial nominees.
Democrats, who have 44 members in the Senate, say the filibuster is a fundamentally important check on the "tyranny of the majority," and changing it would alter the character of the Senate in ways that violate the spirit of the Constitution.
Republicans say prohibiting the use of the filibuster for federal judges would be consistent with the constitutional requirement that the Senate provide advice and consent on presidential nominations. They argue that it means nominees should rise or fall on a simple majority vote, without being thwarted by a filibuster.
