Fair brownback

Topeka Capital-Journal, The, Sep 12, 2005 by Bill Blankenship Capital-Journal

Calm before storm

The suns sets on the first weekend of activities at the state fair

Brownback predicts Roberts confirmation to sail smoothly

HUTCHINSON --- Sen. Sam Brownback, who sits on the Judiciary Committee that today begins hearings on John Roberts' nomination as the next chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, predicts this confirmation process will be the calm before the storm.

"I think this hearing will go pretty smoothly," the Topeka Republican said Saturday during an interview at the Kansas State Fair.

However, when President Bush nominates a replacement for retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, "it will be a donnybrook," Brownback said.

Bush originally nominated Roberts to replace O'Connor, but when Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died, the president named Roberts to take the high court's top seat.

"Now that he's nominated for the Rehnquist seat, I think you'll see the left say, 'Well, it's a conservative replacing a conservative,' " said Brownback, who many regard as the Senate Judiciary Committee's most conservative member.

A new nominee to replace O'Connor will be a completely different matter as the court's first female justice often provided the deciding vote in split decisions on controversial cases.

"That seat will be the swing vote seat in a 5-4 court, and I think you'll really see the hard left in America absolutely come unglued," said Brownback, who is talked about as a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2008.

Brownback said it was likely Democrats could filibuster to block a vote on someone they think is too different from O'Connor to succeed her. Under Senate rules, it would take a vote of 60 senators to end the fillibuster and move to a vote.

If that happens, Brownback said he expects the 55-member Republican majority in the Senate would exercise the so-called "nuclear option."

In this parliamentary maneuver, GOP senators would seek a ruling from the chamber's presiding officer, most likely Vice President Dick Cheney in his capacity as president of the Senate, that filibusters against judicial nominees are unconstitutional.

If Cheney so rules, it would take only a simple majority of 51 votes to uphold the ruling in the Senate and confirm O'Connor's replacement.

It is called the "nuclear option" because Democrats could retaliate by using every possible procedural way to grind Senate business to a halt.

While Brownback said he thinks Roberts' nomination will advance to a vote without such a high degree of bipartisan rancor, he does expect to see and hear "a lot of posturing" during the hearings on the chief justice nominee.

"I think you're going to hear a lot of discussion about what the court is and what the court should be from both the left and the right," said Brownback, who called that process of staking out positions "a warm-up to Elvis," the confirmation of O'Connor's successor.

As to whom Brownback, a strong opponent of abortion, would like to see Bush nominate as a replacement for O'Connor, he didn't offer any names.

"I hope he puts forward a woman," Brownback said.

Whether Bush nominates a man or woman, Brownback said, the next Supreme Court nominee should be what he called a "strict constructionist," a jurist who sticks to the meaning of the words in the Constitution as they were used at the time of its drafting without reading too much into them.

Brownback, an abortion opponent, says a question likely to be heard this week will be, "Is there a right to abortion in the Constitution?" No one expects Roberts or any other judicial nominee to directly answer that question.

However, it was clear Brownback thinks a true "strict constructionist" would answer "no," unlike the majority in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

Sen. Sam Brownback

said next nomination is likely to breed controversy

Storm: 'I hope he puts forward a woman'

Please see STORM, Page 3B

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