THE SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS AGAINST THE FILIBUSTER

Some in the media are complaining about special interest groups fighting it out in the Senate over the judicial nominees but they imply that the fight is between two evenly matched sides when this is not the case. The push to eliminate judicial filibusters comes almost entirely from the radical religious right and those who wish to maintain the filibuster are fewer in number and less organized.

Activists Pressure Both Sides in Judge Debate
By Janet Hook Times Staff Writer
Wed May 18, 7:55 AM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/20050518/ts_latimes/activistspressurebothsidesinjudgedebate


"We feel like there should be zero compromise, no deal," said Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Assn., a Mississippi-based conservative group whose members were among those flooding Lott's home-state offices with phone calls and e-mails in protest.

"Sen. Frist needs to bring up the nominees and move full-speed ahead — no picking up hitchhiking compromises, no detours, no sightseeing," said Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women of America, a conservative advocacy group.

"For Monopoly players, that is like offering to trade Park Place and Boardwalk for Baltic and Mediterranean," Dobson said. "If Republicans consent to this disaster, they'll not only be abandoning the men and women who put them in office, they'll be demonstrating that they do not deserve the leadership entrusted to them."

An e-mail "action alert" urging conservatives to call Lott's office was sent by Rick Scarborough, a Baptist minister in Texas who is organizing support among ministers for the Republican assault on the filibuster. "Tell Lott we're not impressed," said Scarborough.

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Christian conservatives fight filibusters

BY WAYNE SLATER

The Dallas Morning News
Posted on Tue, May. 17, 2005

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/nation/11666817.htm


DALLAS - (KRT) - Kelly Shackelford is no stranger to matters of politics and faith, so picking a fight over the filibuster seemed only natural.

With a showdown looming in the Senate this week, Shackelford and a national network of grass-roots Christian conservatives are working furiously - some publicly, some behind the scenes - to win confirmation of the president's judicial nominees.

"You can pick an issue that our supporters really care about, and it's all going to be affected by what kind of judges we have," said Shackelford, who heads the Plano, Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute.

Under attack, he said, are "religious freedom, the misuse of the concept of separation of church and state, marriage and life."

"We're e-mailing, conference-calling and everything we can," said Rick Scarborough, a Baptist pastor from Lufkin, Texas, who heads the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration.

Scarborough said he has enlisted several thousand Christian ministers for his Patriot Pastor network.

"We're lost enormous ground in this country morally as a result of the acts of judges," he said. "We as Christian conservatives have concluded that the warfare right now is more in the courts than at the ballot box."

The fight over federal judges has led to an unprecedented show of coordination among conservative groups.

"I've got a list of over 50 groups who've signed on to work on confirmations," said David Barton, founder of the Texas-based group WallBuilders, which has challenged the separation of religion from public life. "The networking that's occurring now wasn't occurring five, 10 years ago."

Gary Marx, who heads a Virginia-based confederation of about 75 groups, said his members have tapped a network of 675,000 grass-roots conservatives in six states for a pressure campaign on potentially wayward Republicans.

In Ohio, the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church said at a gathering of 1,000 Patriot Pastors last week that the issues underscoring the filibuster fight transcend partisan politics.

"We're not Democrats. We're not Republicans. We're Christocrats," he declared.

Dobson told his Focus on the Family radio audience that if the Democrats prevail in the fight over judges, "the things that we believe in are gone."

Shackelford said Friday that it is not an overstatement to say the pending Senate vote over filibustering judges is among the most important decisions in decades.