Drugs/Medicare:
The House passage of a bill allowing reimportation from Canada of prescription drugs has ramifications on the Hill.
1) President Bush had opposed drug reimportation, and the House leadership, as they always do, took his side. The bill got a vote because of a deal cut by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill.) to gain the vote of Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R.-Mo.) on the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R.-Tex.) opposed this deal.
2) Republican leaders were unable to get even close to enough votes to sink the bill after they promised a vote. This reflects some real problems in the House GOP leadership.
3) First, Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R.-Mo.) is clearly not as effective as his predecessor and sponsor, DeLay. This is not the first vote Blunt has lost, and some Republicans are expressing displeasure with his job performance. Blunt is seen as merely counting votes and not winning votes. Already, there is some GOP talk about seeking a new whip in the future.
4) Second, the lost reimportation vote (with 87 Republicans voting against Bush to pass it) points to some strained relationships with the White House. The strains show with the rank-and-file members but also with the leadership. Virtually the entire Republican conference, including leaders, bailed out on the Administration over FCC anti-monopoly rules.
5) Conservative back-benchers are unhappy that they have received no support from the White House on trying to pull the Medicare, Education and Energy bills to the right. The White House, on those three issues and more, has sent clear signals it will sign any legislation. If the President will not go to bat for them, they think, why should they go to bat for the White House?
6) The House GOP Leaders are similarly unhappy. Citing Bush's campaign finance reform signature, their inability to get meetings with senior White House staff and reprimands from junior White House staff, leadership aides are less than enamored with the White House. In the face of this arrogance, leadership is not excited about spending political capital to win a vote that is more important to the administration than Congress or the Party.
7) The reimportation bill's future will not be clear until the end of recess. The Hastert-Emerson deal means the House will push to include reimportation in the House-Senate conference committee. Endangering this promise, five of the eight House conferees voted against reimportation on the floor, including DeLay and Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R.-Calif.), who is serving as the conference chairman.
8) A central issue during debate of this provision will be the role of the Secretary of Health and Human Services in allowing or blocking importation of specific drugs.
Judges:
By the end of this week, there will be four unprecedented filibusters of lower court nominees.
1) D.C. Lawyer Miguel Estrada and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen have been held up in filibusters for months. Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Pryor will join that list this week when Republicans move for a vote on his nomination, as will Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl.
2) Some Democrats are worried that that GOP may try to parlay the Pryor filibuster into gains in the Catholic vote. Republicans and Pryor's supporters are charging with anti-Catholicism those Democrats who claim Pryor's "deeply held beliefs" will prevent him from being a fair judge.
3) On Friday, President Bush nominated to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C. two more judges whom the liberal advocacy groups vociferously oppose: California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown and former Deputy White House Counsel Brett Kavanaugh.
4) Already Sen. Charles Schumer (D.-N.Y.) has expressed his opposition to both of these nominations. Schumer, along with Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.), is the ringleader in the Democratic Caucus regarding judicial nominees.
5) Many conservatives consider Brown the perfect candidate in the case of a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Brown is a black woman from the segregated South with a conservative record on the bench. Kavanaugh was an aide to Clinton-era special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and played a role in impeachment.
6) U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering of Mississippi-whose nomination died in the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote last year under Democratic control and then passed committee on a party-line vote this year-will likely join the filibuster queue before the year is out.
7) Arkansas Lawyer Leon Holmes, however, may face opposition to his district court nomination from liberals within the GOP. Democrats have signaled they may not filibuster his nomination, but Holmes' allies say he doesn't have unanimous Republican support.
