Source: Senate Democrats

National Review editor Rich Lowry, who previously called judicial filibusters a “perversion” of democratic checks and balances and urged the Republican Senate majority leader to end them and then “sleep the sleep of an utterly justified defender of Senate tradition” is lashing out at Senate Democrats for taking his advice.

On November 21, Senate Democrats responded to the Republican minority's unprecedented wave of filibusters of President Obama's executive and judicial nominees by changing the Senate rules to allow their confirmation with the support of a simple majority. In 2005, when Senate Democrats were in the minority and blocked the confirmation of a handful of President Bush's judicial nominees, many in the conservative media urged then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) to take that same step. That “nuclear option” was not deployed after several Senate Democrats agreed to allow the confirmation of most of the held-up nominees.

Discussing the issue on Fox's The Real Story, Lowry accused President Obama of trying to “pack” a prominent appeals court and called Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “the biggest hypocrite in the country” because he supposedly “made the filibuster for judges sound like the most sacrosanct institution in our Constitutional republic” in 2005 and “now, when it's convenient for him, he's changing it.”

While accusing others of hypocrisy, Lowry sweeps under the rug his fulsome support for eliminating the filibuster in 2005 after Democrats filibustered several arch-conservative Bush nominees. At the time, Lowry called judicial filibusters a “perversion” that flew in the face of the Senate tradition of bringing “a president's nominees to the floor for an up-or-down vote without filibusters.” He urged Frist to “take away [Democrats'] ability to mount unprecedented judicial filibusters through the so-called nuclear option, then sleep the sleep of an utterly justified defender of Senate tradition.” 

Reid and the Senate Democrats are responding to the dramatic change in circumstances since 2005. While Democrats blocked a handful of nominees who they considered ideologically extreme, Republicans have engaged in an unprecedented effort to obstruct the confirmations of virtually all Obama nominees, including some positions for which they say they will accept no nominee at all.

As the Office of the Majority Leader explains, according to the Congressional Research Service, “nearly half of all the filibusters waged on nominations in the history of the United States have been waged by Republicans under President Obama.  In the history of the U.S., 168 nominees have been filibustered - with 82 occurring during the Obama administration. In the history of the U.S., 23 district court nominees have been filibustered - with 20 being Obama nominees.”

This effort has included the blanket filibustering of all nominees for the U.S. D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which Republicans now claim does not require a full complement of judges. Republicans have filibustered more than twice as many Obama executive branch nominees as were blocked during the Bush administration.