Inside Politics

Over to you, Tom

The tables have turned on bankruptcy reform legislation that Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, derailed last year by attaching language that singled out abortion protesters, United Press International’s Peter Roff writes.

Mr. Schumer was so intent on preventing abortion protesters from filing for bankruptcy in the wake of court fines that he was willing to let the bankruptcy legislation die. But, on the bright side for Mr. Schumer, it did put Republican legislators in the uncomfortable position of disappointing business groups anxious for reform or pro-life activists who felt they would be discriminated against.

“Ultimately, Congress failed to act on the package. Now, the tables have turned,” Mr. Roff wrote.

“Without the reform package, several important bankruptcy protections — including one that applies to family farmers — expired on Dec. 31, 2003. To fix the problem, the Senate sent a bill to the House restoring and extending the family farm protections — which the House leadership attached the ‘clean’ bankruptcy reform package, without the Schumer language, and sent back to the Senate.

“Now Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, is the one who is in a tough spot. If he consents to having the bill — with its protection for South Dakota’s family farmers included — moved forward, then he runs the risk of antagonizing Schumer and the other pro-abortion-rights members of the Democratic caucus as well as the outside interest groups that are an important part of his party’s electoral coalition.

“If he blocks the bill, he will antagonize the corporate community and, more importantly, will be seen in his home state as allowing national politics to trump an issue of great importance to South Dakota’s family farmers — in a year in which he is running for re-election.”

The real scandal

“A man from the U.S. Senate’s Sergeant-at-Arms Office called this week, asking us to give up the name of one of our sources,” the Wall Street Journal says in an editorial.

“A formal probe is under way to discover how last November we got our hands on Democratic strategy memos on how to defeat President Bush’s judicial nominees. We politely told the gentleman to take a hike,” the newspaper said.

“But we have a question of our own: Why are Senate Republican leaders, specifically Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch and Majority Leader Bill Frist, cooperating with this vindictive little inquisition against their own employees? The scandal is what is in the memos, not how they were leaked. Yet you’d never know that from the way Senators Hatch and Frist have been rolling over for the same Democrats who have been treating them with contempt the past three years.

“The memos — which we first reported and can now be read at www.fairjudiciary.com — show the extent to which liberal interest groups are micromanaging the Democrats’ opposition to Mr. Bush’s judicial picks. That’s not exactly a news flash. But the details are pretty astonishing and expose the opposition for the cynically partisan, and sometimes race-baiting, exercise it is. As one memo to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin put it, Miguel Estrada had to be defeated because ‘he is Latino.’

“And there may be worse,” the newspaper said, referring to a memo that said Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund wanted Democrats to “hold off” on confirming nominees to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals until the University of Michigan affirmative action case was decided.

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