Cornyn chooses principle in giving judicial nominee a vote

Republicans in the U.S. Senate blasted Democrats for obstructing up-or-down votes on President George W. Bush’s nominees to federal appellate courts.

In 2005, when Republicans controlled the Senate as well as the White House, they threatened a "nuclear option," which would blow up the filibuster rules to keep that stalling technique from being used on judicial nominees.

The chamber was brought back from the brink of a meltdown by 14 senators — seven Republicans and seven Democrats — who firmly stood in the center of the partisan divide and promised they would support a filibuster only under extraordinary circumstances.

Although Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wasn’t in that "gang of 14," he has repeatedly called it wrong to talk to death a president’s choices for the federal bench.

But no matter. Things have changed, he now says. So this week he decided it was a dandy idea to filibuster the nomination of U.S. District Judge David Hamilton of Indiana, whom President Barack Obama wanted to elevate to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.

Situational ethics, perhaps?

The issue wasn’t really whether Hamilton has the brains, credentials and experience to be a federal appellate judge.

He had support from his home-state senators, Republican Richard Lugar and Democrat Evan Bayh, plus a well-qualified rating from the American Bar Association.

But Sessions and others don’t like some of Hamilton’s rulings on hot-button issues such as church-state separation and abortion restrictions.

Still, their obstructionism fell flat, and notably so.

Ten Republicans joined 58 Democrats and two Independents in saying, "Let’s remove the blockade and give the man the up-or-down vote each and every judicial candidate with basic qualifications for the job deserves."

To his credit, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a Judiciary Committee member and former state court judge, was among the Republicans who voted to give Hamilton his day in court, so to speak.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, also a Republican, was the only senator not to vote on whether to end the delay. She and Cornyn both voted against confirming Hamilton, though he was approved by the full Senate on Thursday, 59-39.

Cornyn chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and he can partisan with the best of them. But he has also argued that judges shouldn’t be chosen based on litmus tests, that politicians shouldn’t demand promises in exchange for confirmation, that the same rules should apply regardless of which political party is in the majority and that "every judicial nominee is entitled to an up-or-down vote."

It’s commendable that he showed consistency on that last principle when some of his fellow Republicans conveniently forgot it.

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