Promises, Promises

According to the Wall Street Journal today,

[Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee] pulled a fast one on both Senate rules and courtesy by reneging on his multiple promises to give Judge Shedd a committee vote this fall. In the process he took a special slap at retiring Senator Strom Thurmond. A fellow South Carolinian, Mr. Shedd used to work for Mr. Thurmond when he was chairman of Judiciary. Mr. Leahy had assured the Senator as recently as last week that Judge Shedd would get a vote. He’d made similar promises to Senators Hatch, Grassley and Brownback, among others.

Apparently Mr. Leahy counts his promises as less important than winning an election by whatever means.

Although he seems to have been born right after the earth cooled, after which he went immediately to the Senate, Sen. Thurmond is actually only 100 years old. He’s retiring, and he’d been personally promised a vote on his former staff member Dennis Shedd’s nomination to the Fourth Circuit before he left the Senate.

As the Washington Post reported,

Retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, two months shy of his 100th birthday, denounced Senate Democrats yesterday for not using his last appearance before the Judiciary Committee to consider a former aide’s nomination to the Richmond-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

“I took you at your word,” Thurmond told Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who Republican senators said had promised that U.S. District Judge Dennis Shedd, a former Thurmond aide and former Judiciary Committee counsel, would get a vote in the committee. “In 40 years in the Senate, I have never been treated in such a manner.”

Leahy delayed the vote on Shedd, saying it was too contentious to get done quickly.

In the past a Senator’s word was said to be his bond. Now, it would appear, corporate culprits like Enron are not the only ones defaulting on their bonds. Sen. Leahy and his colleagues apparently view their promises not as commitments to keep but rather as mere words, like statutory “deadlines,” subject to liberal construing.

UPDATE – Byron York has an interesting article on NRO emphasizing the personal promise-breaking. In addition, Republicans charge that Leahy’s refusal to vote on Shedd actually violated committee rules.

“I am struck by the irony,” Hatch said at the meeting, “that several members of this committee who support the rule-breaking removal of the Shedd nomination talk a good game about the importance of judges following the law and not ignoring it when it would suit them to do so. Today we learn that such talk is just talk.”

Say What? (3)

  1. Fritz Schranck October 10, 2002 at 10:42 pm | | Reply

    Senator Leahy may have an opportunity to discover that paybacks are hell, especially when a fellow Senator feels double-crossed and his party members agree with him.

    The usual problem with that fact, however, is that the folks in Vermont may pay the first toll, and be only dimly aware that it’s actually aimed at making Leahy pay./f

  2. John Rosenberg October 10, 2002 at 10:52 pm | | Reply

    Good comment, Fritz. I think one of the most interesting aspects of the Leahy fiasco is that his Judiciary Committee voted 9-9 on sending Shedd’s name to the floor, thus blocking it, but with Sen. Joe Biden (your Senator!) abstaining. That abstention, I think, can only be viewed as a real slap at Leahy, more resounding, I suspect, than Hatch’s more heated denunciation.

  3. Keith Ross March 18, 2005 at 11:19 pm | | Reply

    Blocking the Vote 40 Years After “Bloody Sunday”

    By Ryan Paul Haygood

    The tragic, history-making events of “Bloody Sunday,” on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, ultimately freed the vote for millions of African Americans. Forty years later, as we reflect on the march that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we are also reminded that more than two million African Americans continue to be denied the right to vote by felon disfranchisement laws.

    Black voter registration in Selma in 1965 was made virtually impossible by Alabama’s relentless efforts to block the Black vote, which included requiring Blacks to interpret entire sections of Alabama’s constitution, an impossible feat for even the most learned. On one occasion, even a Black man who had earned a Ph.D. was unable to pass Alabama’s literacy test.

    On Bloody Sunday, John Lewis and Reverend Hosea Williams led almost 600 unarmed men, women and children in a peaceful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery to dramatize to the nation their desire as Black people to participate in the political process.

    As they crossed the highest part of the bridge, Alabama state troopers, who ridiculed, tear-gassed, clubbed, spat on, whipped and trampled them with their horses, viciously attacked the marchers. In the end, Lewis’s skull was fractured by a state trooper’s nightstick, and 17 other marchers were hospitalized.

    In direct response to Bloody Sunday, President Lyndon Johnson, five months later, signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Considered by many to be the greatest victory of the civil-rights movement, the Voting Rights Act removed barriers, such as literacy tests, that had long kept Blacks from voting.

    Despite the promise of increased political participation by Blacks and other racial minorities created by the Voting Rights Act, its full potential has not been realized by one of the last excluded segments of our society: Americans with felony convictions.

    Today, nearly 5 million Americans are literally locked out of the political process by state felon disfranchisement laws that disqualify people with felony convictions from voting.

    The historical record reveals that to prevent newly freed Blacks from voting after the Civil War, many state legislatures in the North and South tailored their felon disfranchisement laws to require the loss of voting rights only for those offenses committed mostly by Blacks.

    Indeed, in recognition of the fact that Alabama’s felon disfranchisement law was enacted in 1901 to prevent Blacks from voting and to reinforce white supremacy, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Hunter v. Underwood, struck down Alabama’s provision as unconstitutional. Alabama’s felon disfranchisement law was subsequently reenacted.

    As intended, modern day felon disfranchisement laws serve to disproportionately weaken the voting strength of Black and Latino communities. This results largely from the disproportionate enforcement of drug laws in Black and Latino communities, which has expanded exponentially the number of people of color subjected to disfranchisement.

    State felon disfranchisement statues are the most destructive in Black and Latino communities, which are often affected disproportionately by numerous socioeconomic ills, including concentrated poverty, substandard education, housing and healthcare. As a result, people in these communities are even less able to combat these social ills through the ballot box.

    Regrettably, 40 years after 600 people literally risked their lives on Bloody Sunday to expand democracy for Blacks and other racial minorities, and in the 40th anniversary year of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Blacks and Latinos, rather than experiencing increased political participation, are actually losing their voting rights daily.

    It is time to erase felon disfranchisement laws from the books. Indeed, the integrity and legitimacy of America’s democracy, and the fulfillment of the promise of the Voting Rights Act and the human sacrifice that led to its passage, depends on it.

    Ryan Paul Haygood is assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and Right the Vote, a national campaign which seeks to restore voting rights to persons with felony convictions.

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