WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Well, there goes one of my favorite jokes -- to wit, insisting that Miguel Estrada is actually Japanese.
After waiting two and a half years for the Senate's Democrats to allow a vote on his nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Estrada has decided to become rich. Rather than hear such paragons of balderdash as the Hon. Charles E. Schumer calumniate him as politically extreme, Estrada withdrew his name from the Senate's butcher block.
Now, he will continue his extremely lucrative law practice at one of Washington's most prestigious law firms. For over two years, he has wondered if he would be able to afford a lovely country retreat in rural Virginia, which he would like to refurbish. Now he knows that he can afford the place and enjoy his weekends planting gardens, reading books and watching the Hon. Schumer slander other Republicans on the weekend talk shows for allowing the president to nominate them for public service.
The Hon. Schumer, having won the support in New York of some of American politics' most exotic single-issue fanatics, now spends his time blocking Republican judicial nominees by calling them extremists. The fact of the matter is that compared to Estrada, the Hon. Schumer is the aberrant one. Estrada, whom I have known for years, holds no views outside the mainstream of American life. He is a perfectly normal American. When a politician comes along and depicts such a normal person as extreme, it is the name-calling politician who is the extremist, not the normal American.
Schumer and his bitter-end Democrats have adopted the novel idea that a judicial nominee's "ideology" disqualifies the nominee, if that ideology is not congenial with Schumer. Actually, if the federal government is to have a working judiciary, ideology does not matter. What does matter is that the nominees have integrity, knowledge of the law and the understanding that judges apply law to cases. They do not make law.
By opposing Republican judicial nominees over the matter of "ideology," the Democrats have politicized the courts. They have also broken the rules hitherto followed in confirming a judicial appointment. Until Schumer adopted his extremist position, a judicial nominee was confirmed or rejected by a simple majority in the Senate. But with the nomination of Estrada (and two remaining judicial nominations), the Democrats commenced a historically unprecedented filibuster. As a consequence, 60 votes in the Senate are necessary to confirm a filibustered nominee because 60 votes are needed to end a filibuster.