Chat With Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist

Bill Frist just walked in.  Highlights from the conversation will be posted here.

Introductory remarks:

• Frist first stated his intent to make the distribution of realtime information through the blog medium a high priority for his office in the coming year.
• On Alito, his clearly stated primary goal is to ensure he's given a fair and timely up or down vote.  He referred to the "insufferable temper tantrums" often thrown by Senate Democrats that seek to delay and obstruct in such situations.
• Thematically, Frist sees the Democrats going back to "feeble attempts" to preventing progress in America, characterized by obstruction, postponement, and evasion.  He referred to having spent time recently with Senators Santorum, Lott, McCain, and others to examine ways to address this problem.  Specific tools he mentioned included lobbying reform and internal procedural reform, seeking to make the Senate more efficient, more responsive, and less succeptible to unfair delay and obstruction.

On the timeline of Alito's hearings, Frist lamented certain maneuvers that may be taken in the Judiciary Committee to unduly delay the nominee.  Frist certainly seemed to suspect that a one week delay (which is invokable by any single committee member) might be used to then tee up a delay past the President's State of the Union address, the goal being no less admirable than simply embarrassing the President.

Questions:

Would you force filibustering Democrats to actually go through the filibustery motions of endless debate or allow them the less arduous filibuster-lite version where the Senators just go home?

It depends.  That's more a matter of staging, whereas the real issue is getting 60 votes to invoke cloture.

Of the 8 members of Congress briefed on the NSA program, have you heard from anyone demanding it be stopped?

No.  Those briefed were bipartisan members of the Intelligence Committee and of the bicameral leadership.  And to my knowledge, none of them have stated or anywhere implied they had a problem with the practice.

Did the NSA program stop attacks on United States?

Yes.  It resulted in intercepts of al Qaeda information and we had great success with this program.

How confident are you that Alito won't be filibustered?

Since he's as qualified as any nominee in history to sit on this Court (based on number of cases, mastery of judicial thought, integrity, character, and judicial temperament), Democrats, if rational, would self-destruct if they tried to assassinate Judge Alito by filibuster.

Do you think it's rational to presume rational thought among Senate Democrats?

They continue to disappoint me.  If their goal is to delay Alito's confirmation until after th State of the Union, just to embarrass the President, i think it'll backfire.

If the Constitutional option is numerically viable, would Democrats risk a filibuster?

First of all, I didn't necessarily want to use it back when the Gang of 14 was born.  I wanted to show that I had it. And I still do. It's right here [tapping his pocket] and I can pull it out whenever I want.