Estrada withdraws name from court consideration

Washington lawyer Miguel A. Estrada, the first Hispanic nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, withdrew his name from consideration yesterday after more than two years of debate over his nomination.

An eight-month Democratic filibuster prevented a Senate vote on the Estrada nomination, which took 16 months to get a hearing by the Judiciary Committee.

“I believe that the time has come to return my full attention to the practice of law and to regain the ability to make long-term plans for my family,” Mr. Estrada wrote in a letter delivered to President Bush yesterday.

Calling it a “political hate crime” and an “American nightmare,” Republicans and a handful of Democrats lashed out at the 45 Senate Democrats who led the filibuster against Mr. Estrada.

“Mr. Estrada received disgraceful treatment at the hands of 45 United States Senators during the more than two years his nomination was pending,” Mr. Bush said in a written statement. “The treatment of this fine man is an unfortunate chapter in the Senate’s history.”

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay went further: “The Democrats’ character assassination of Miguel Estrada was a political hate crime. We have witnessed the Democrats at their ugliest.”

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat and an architect of the filibuster against Mr. Estrada, defended his efforts as being completely within the bounds of the Constitution.

“The Founding Fathers did not want the Senate to be a rubber stamp,” he said, referring to the Senate’s “advice and consent” responsibility dealing with judicial nominees.

Specifically, Democrats say they opposed Mr. Estrada because they didn’t know enough about him and his legal work. They demanded that his legal writings be turned over from his days as a lawyer in the Solicitor General’s Office in the Clinton administration.

The White House refused, arguing that any such documents would be privileged. Republicans also trotted out four Democratic solicitors general who concurred and said it would be a dangerous precedent to release Mr. Estrada’s writings.

Mr. Schumer remained insistent on the point, saying yesterday that “the White House thumbed its nose at the constitutionally prescribed role of the Senate in the nominations process.”

Republicans offered a more sinister explanation for the Democratic blockade.

Born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Mr. Estrada arrived in the United States as a teenager speaking no english and with no apparent prospects. In time, he earned a law degree from Harvard University, argued cases before the Supreme Court and joined a successful law firm.

Naming Mr. Estrada to the appeals court and, possibly one day, to the Supreme Court could provide significant bragging rights for Mr. Bush among Hispanics, the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States.

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