My new Confirmation Tales post—“New Republican Majority Dooms Nominee: And White House counsel Abner Mikva isn’t happy with me”—begins to explore the consequences of the Republican takeover of the Senate in the 1994 elections. An excerpt:
As some folks have been slow to recognize or acknowledge, it matters a lot which party controls the Senate. When the filibuster is off the table, as it was during the Clinton years and has been again since Democrats abolished the filibuster for lower-court judges in 2013, a president who has same-party control of the Senate can count on getting his nominees confirmed. Conversely, a president who is facing a Senate controlled by the opposing party faces a much greater challenge. An adverse chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee can simply refuse to hold a hearing on a nominee he wants to block.
That’s what Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden did when President George H.W. Bush nominated John G. Roberts, Jr. to a D.C. Circuit seat in January 1992. In June of that same year, Biden also gave a long Senate floor speech in which he warned Bush not even to make a nomination if a Supreme Court vacancy arose before that year’s presidential election.
So with the new Republican majority in the Senate that resulted from the 1994 elections, a big question going into 1995 was how strong a stand Hatch in particular and Republicans in general would take against Clinton’s judicial nominees.
In December 1994, the Los Angeles lawyers chapter of the Federalist Society invited me to speak on judicial confirmations in the next Senate. As a virtual unknown, I expected a modest-sized audience. But a few days before the event, I learned from the organizer that supporters of stalled district-court nominee Samuel Paz were purchasing tickets in large quantities and planned to show up en masse at the lunchtime event to signal their support for Paz.
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