Four years and four months ago, the Supreme Court of the United States, in
a bitterly divided 5 to 4 decision, issued an unsigned opinion that the majority
cautioned should never be used as a precedent for any subsequent case anywhere
in the federal court system.

Their ruling conferred the presidency on a candidate who had lost the
popular vote, and it inflamed partisan passions that had already been aroused by
the long and hard-fought election campaign. I couldn't have possibly disagreed
more strongly with the opinion that I read shortly before midnight that evening,
December 12, 2000. But I knew what course of action best served our republic.

Even though many of my supporters said they were unwilling to accept a
ruling which they suspected was brazenly partisan in its motivation and simply
not entitled to their respect, less than 24 hours later, I went before the
American people to reaffirm the bedrock principle that we are a nation of laws,
not men. "There is a higher duty than the one we owe to a political party," I
said. "This is America and we put country before party." The demonstrators and
counter-demonstrators left the streets and the nation moved on -- as it should
have -- to accept the inauguration of George W. Bush as our 43rd president.

Having gone through that experience, I can tell you -- without any doubt
whatsoever -- that if the justices who formed the majority in Bush v. Gore had
not only all been nominated to the Court by a Republican president, but had also
been confirmed by only Republican Senators in party-line votes, America would
not have accepted that court's decision.

Moreover, if the confirmation of those justices in the majority had been
forced through by running roughshod over 200 years of Senate precedents and
engineered by a crass partisan decision on a narrow party line vote to break the
Senate's rules of procedure then no speech imaginable could have calmed the
passions aroused in our country.

Now some, like myself, have strongly questioned the partisan-ties of the
judges in the majority of the case and still have not accepted the
decision. But the majority of Americans have. And I think Gore's
point is well taken. He hits all the main points, from the hypocrisy
of the new Republican Senator from Georgia praising the filibuster for
Iraq to protect the rights of the minority while trying to take it away
here at home, to the unconscionable threats by the right (it goes beyond
the religious right now) to the independent federal judiciary.

Now we are told that the federal judiciary is facing a dire crisis that
requires us to break the rules of the Senate and discard the most important
guarantee of the deliberative nature of Senate proceedings.

As with the previous "crises" that turned out to be falsely described,
this one too cannot survive scrutiny. The truth is that the Senate has confirmed
205 or over 95% of President Bush's nominees. Democrats have held up only ten
nominees, less than 5 percent. Compare that with the 60 Clinton nominees who
were blocked by Republican obstruction between 1995 and 2000. In fact, under the
procedures used by Republicans during the Clinton/ Gore Administration, far
fewer than the 41 Senators necessary to sustain a filibuster were able to
routinely block the Senate from voting on judges nominated by the president.
They allowed Republican Senators to wage shadow filibusters to prevent some
nominees from even getting a hearing before the Judiciary Committee. Other
nominees were victims of shadow filibusters after receiving a hearing and were
not allowed a committee vote. Still others were reported out of committee, and
not allowed a vote on the Senate floor.

To put the matter in perspective, when President Clinton left office, there
were more than 100 vacant judgeships largely due to Republican obstructionist
tactics. Ironically, near the end of the Clinton-Gore administration, the
Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said: "There is no vacancy
crisis and a little perspective clearly belies the assertion that 103 vacancies
represent a systematic crisis."

Comically, soon after President Bush took office, when the number of
vacancies had already been reduced, the same Republican committee chairman
sounded a shrill alarm. Because of the outstanding vacancies, he said, "We're
reaching a crisis in our federal courts."

Now, the number of vacancies is lower than it has been in many years: 47
vacancies out of 877 judgeships -- and for the majority of those vacancies, the
President has not even sent a nominee to the Senate. Yet still, the Republican
drive for one-party control leads them to cry over and over again: "Crisis!
Crisis in the courts!" It is hypocritical, and it is simply false.

Republicans have also claimed quite disingenuously that the filibustering
of judicial nominees is unprecedented. History, however, belies their claim. I
served in the Senate for eight of my 16 years in Congress -- and then another 8
years as President of the Senate in my capacity as Vice President. Moreover, my
impressions of the Senate date back to earlier decades -- because my father was
a Senator when I was growing up.

From that perspective, I have listened with curiosity to some of the
statements made during the current debate. For example, I have heard the Senate
Majority Leader, who is from my home state and should know better, say that no
Court nominee has ever been filibustered before the current president's term.
But I vividly remember not only the dozens of nominees sent to the Senate by
President Clinton who were denied a vote and filibustered by various means, I
also remember in 1968 when my father was the principal sponsor of another
Tennessean -- Abe Fortas -- who was nominated to be Chief Justice by President
Lyndon Johnson. Fortas was filibustered and denied an up or down vote. The
cloture vote was taken on October 1, 1968. When it failed by a vote of 45-43,
President Johnson was forced by the filibuster to withdraw the nomination.

My father's Senate colleague and friend from Tennessee, Howard Baker, said
during that filibuster, "On any issue, the majority at any given moment is not
always right." And no Democrat would take issue with that statement, then or
now. It is part of the essence of the U.S. Senate.

This fight is not about responding to a crisis. It is about the desire of
the administration and the Senate leadership to stifle debate in order to get
what they want when they want it. What is involved here is a power grab -- pure
and simple.

And what makes it so dangerous for our country is their willingness to do
serious damage to our American democracy in order to satisfy their lust for
total one-party domination of all three branches of government. They seek
nothing less than absolute power. Their grand design is an all-powerful
executive using a weakened legislature to fashion a compliant judiciary in its
own image. They envision a total breakdown of the separation of powers. And in
its place they want to establish a system in which power is unified in the
service of a narrow ideology serving a narrow set of interests.

Their coalition of supporters includes both right-wing religious extremists
and exceptionally greedy economic special interests. Both groups are seeking
more and more power for their own separate purposes. If they were to achieve
their ambition -- and exercise the power they seek -- America would face the
twin dangers of an economic blueprint that eliminated most all of the safeguards
and protections established for middle class families throughout the 20th
century and a complete revision of the historic insulation of the rule of law
from sectarian dogma. One of the first casualties would be the civil liberties
that Americans have come to take for granted.