Important work languishes while Senate leaders battle over fate of filibuster

The Senate leadership is obviously unable to avert the train wreck that is looming in the U.S. Senate. It is Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who have put the filibuster trains on the track, headed toward each other at high speed.
Tomorrow they'll collide, unless six Republican and six Democratic senators reach an agreement to derail their parties trains.
Such an agreement would be for the good of the nation.
Republican leaders have scheduled a vote for Tuesday on the nomination of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla R. Owen to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Unless moderate Democrats and Republicans reach their own compromise, that vote is expected to set off an ugly chain reaction.
It takes only a simple majority of senators to confirm a judicial candidate, and Republicans control 55 of the Senate's 100 seats. But last year, Senate Democrats halted action on 10 appellate court nominees, including Owen, by threatening a filibuster -- a stalling tactic in which a minority refuses to end debate. It takes 60 votes to end a filibuster.
If a vote to end debate fails on Tuesday, Frist plans to use parliamentary sleight of hand to change the Senate rules. Frist says he can change the Senate rules with a simple majority vote to prohibit the filibuster of judicial nominees. In effect, Frist would trump 60 votes with 51.
What's constitutional?
The Republicans have taken to calling this the "constitutional option," but it certainly does not honor the traditional role of the Senate, a body that was designed to be more deliberative than the House and that was supposed to help insure that a narrow majority did not run roughshod over the minority.
Further, it is disingenuous of President Bush and congressional Republicans demand an "up and down vote" on every Bush nominee. Ten of his nominees have been blocked by filibusters or threats of filibusters. Sixty of President Bill Clinton's nominees never go a vote -- not because they were filibustered, but because Republicans controlled the Judiciary Committee and never allowed them to even have a hearing.
And the first judicial filibuster of the modern era was in 1968, when Republicans blocked President Lyndon B. Johnson's nomination of Associate Judges Abe Fortas to become chief justice.
Finally, it's not as if any president has a right to appoint anyone he wants to the courts. By requiring the president to submit his nominees to the Senate, the Founders made it clear that the president didn't have carte blanche. And that was demonstrated to our first president, George Washington, who had his chief justice nominee rejected in 1795.
Much of the debate has now degenerated into posturing. Frist and another vociferous opponent of the filibuster, Rick Santorum, R.-Pa., are already looking at the presidential primaries of 2008 and neither intends to look weak to the conservative Republicans who pick presidential nominees
Reid and the Democrats are trying hard not to look irrelevant.
What matters?
But politicians of both stripes should be more concerned about what the American people are thinking. A recent Gallup poll said 57 percent of Americans disapprove of how Congress is doing its job. That's the highest number in eight years.
And an ABC News/Washington Post poll that asked what issues should get priority in Congress showed that 32 percent thought it should be the economy and jobs; 22 percent, the war in Iraq; 15 percent, health care; 12 percent, the campaign against terrorism; 11 percent, Social Security.
Yet Senate leaders are ready to bring the work of their body to a screeching halt because Republican leaders say the president has a mandate and should be able to appoint judges who will serve 30 or 40 years in lifetime jobs. Meanwhile, Democrats say the presidential election shows this is a narrowly divided nation and they should have the ability to block from the bench nominees who are out of the political mainstream.
Neither side is completely right or wrong, but both will be wrong if they bring the work of the Senate to an ugly and unproductive end.
It is up to the six Republican and six Democratic senators who have been trying to fashion a compromise to get their parties on the right track.