Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)

Sen. Jon Tester’s Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, S. 375, is the rare proposal that would both increase transparency and reduce federal spending. But despite bipartisan support and no obvious opposition, an identical bill died in the last Congress without ever coming up for a vote in a Senate paralyzed by GOP minority obstruction.

An arcane law still allows Senators and Senate candidates to file their campaign finance disclosure statements on paper with the Secretary of the Senate — unlike presidential candidates and campaigns for the House of Representatives — rather than electronically. As a result, those filings are less easily searchable for citizens and require additional processing by the Secretary’s office and the Federal Election Commission. According to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who backed the bill in 2012, the inefficiency costs taxpayers an estimated $430,000 annually.

“This common-sense bill allows folks to know right away who’s funding political campaigns and reflects the accountability and transparency Montanans expect from our elected officials and candidates for public office,” Tester explained in a press release announcing the 2013 version of the bill. “It’s 2013 and high-time for the Senate to bring its campaign finance reporting into the 21st century.” The bill has already attracted 28 co-sponsors, including five Republicans.

At a Senate Rules and Administration Committee hearing last year, Chairman Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the bill a “no-brainer.” Then-Ranking Member Alexander endorsed it and said it “would fix an obvious problem,” noting that the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) had blocked similar efforts in the past. But, despite his support, Alexander warned that unless Senators be given free reign to attach amendments dealing with “other problems in our current system Members might like to address,” it might not see the light of day for five years.

Due to the Senate’s rules, even non-controversial proposals and appointees can take days of the Senate’s floor time — and members of the minority can block votes on legislation they support unless they are allowed to propose unrelated measures. Though 71 Senators ultimately voted for cloture last month on the nomination of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, the Republican minority filibustered the nomination and tied up the Senate for days. The watered-down filibuster reforms agreed to in January did little to address these problems.

As such, even important and non-controversial legislation like Tester’s Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act often fall by the wayside, as happened in 2012.

Rather that try to get a floor vote on small proposals like this, often the best hope is to attach them to larger bills. A spokeswoman for Sen. Tester told ThinkProgress that he hopes to include the bill as part of the FY 2014 Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill.

The growing list of supporters of S. 375 includes Senators Max Baucus (D-MT), Mark Begich (D-AK), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Thad Cochran (R-MS), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Al Franken (D-VA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Johnny Isakson (D-GA), Angus King (I-ME), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Carl Levin (D-MI), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Jack Reed (D-RI), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Jon Tester (D-MT), Mark Udall (D-CO), Tom Udall (D-NM), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)

Durbin said in a floor speech:

We have tried at the beginning of this Senate session to avoid this kind of filibuster confrontation. The last several years we have had over 400 filibusters — a record number of filibusters in the Senate. I hate to suggest this, but if this is an indication of where we’re headed, we need to revisit the rules again. We need to go back to it again. I’m sorry to say it because I — was hopeful that a bipartisan approach to dealing with these issues would work. It’s the best thing for this chamber, for the people serving here and the history of this institution. But if this Caitlin Halligan nomination is an indication of things to come, we’ve got to revisit the rules.

In 2005, Senate Republicans slammed what they called the “unconstitutional” filibuster of President Bush’s nominees. They proposed a mid-session rules change to eliminate the power of the minority to block nominees with majority support. This “constitutional option” was only dropped when a bipartisan group agreed to only filibuster nominees in the most extreme circumstances.

Earlier this year, several Democratic Senators proposed significant changes to the Senate rules permitting minority obstruction of legislation and confirmation votes. Rather than pushing major changes, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reached an agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for a very modest set of reforms.

Already this year, Senate Republicans have filibustered a bill to limit the harms of the sequester, the confirmation of a former Republican colleague to be Secretary of Defense, and — as of Wednesday — the confirmation of John Brennan to be CIA director.

Wednesday marked the second time, Senate Republicans have blocked a confirmation vote for Caitlin Halligan, an Obama nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dating back to 2011. As 41 Senate Republicans voted to filibuster her, only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted to give her an up-or-down vote.

The Senate just voted 51-41 to end the Senate Republicans’ filibuster of Caitlin Halligan to the second highest court in the country, the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit — which in the bizarro world that is the Senate means that Halligan’s nomination will not move forward. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) switched his vote to “no” for procedural reasons, but he supports the nomination.

There are many reasons why Halligan should be a judge. She is among the best attorneys in the country. The court she was nominated to now has four vacancies, and thus will experience an increasingly crushing workload without new judges. Additionally, the DC Circuit’s current conservative majority includes some of the worst judges in the country. Two DC Circuit judges recently joined an opinion claiming that all business, labor or Wall Street regulation is constitutional suspect. Halligan’s confirmation would have diluted those judges’ votes, which is an important goal in and of itself.

There is, however, also a very bad reason to keep Halligan off the bench. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the highest ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently claimed, Halligan’s “got gun problems.”

Of course, her so-called “gun problem” is that she once argued a position that the NRA disagrees with when she was Solicitor General of the state of New York. And the idea that she should be blocked for the positions she argued as a government attorney is completely absurd. By that logic, Republicans should also block Republican superlawyer Paul Clement because he is too friendly to Obamacare.

But the NRA is not a logical organization — their CEO recently claimed that we all need to arm ourselves to defend against violent Latinos and the collapse of civilization. So it’s not surprising that they would take an unreasonable position on Halligan. Nevertheless, it is deeply unfortunate that 40 senators are still following the lead of this fringe organization.

A Washington Post profile of President Obama’s efforts to diversify the federal bench provides an interesting window into the depth of his commitment to this project. Of the 35 judicial nominees currently pending before the Senate, “17 of the 35 pending judicial nominees are women, 15 are ethnic minorities and five are openly gay.” Only six are white straight men.

To be sure, this particular slice of the President’s judicial nominees is unusually diverse, but Obama has still shown a great commitment to judicial diversity than any of his predecessors. “During Obama’s first term, 37 percent of his confirmed judges were nonwhites, compared with 19 percent for President George W. Bush and 27 percent for President Bill Clinton. The trend is similar on gender: 42 percent of Obama’s first-term judges were women, compared with 21 percent for Bush and 30 percent for Clinton.” As ThinkProgress previously reported, Obama has quadrupled the number of openly gay judges with lifetime appointments to the federal bench (although this has as much to do with the fact that there was only one openly gay Article III judge before Obama took office as it does with the President’s nominees).

It should be noted that, while the President’s devotion to judicial diversity is admirable, his record on judicial confirmations would be stronger if he were quicker to nominate judges — the majority of vacancies currently do not have a nominee. Likewise, because the biggest obstacle to swift judicial confirmations remains widespread filibusters by Senate Republicans, Senate Democrats will ultimately need to push through a more aggressive filibuster reform package than the fairly weak package enacted earlier this year or else many of the President’s nominees are likely to languish behind a curtain of obstructionism.

As soon as next week, the Senate is expected to consider Caitlin Halligan’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Halligan is a former Supreme Court clerk, a former Solicitor General of the state of New York, and is currently general counsel for one of the largest prosecutor’s offices in the country. She received the highest possible rating from the American Bar Association. And she was enthusiastically endorsed by a bipartisan group of some of the top Supreme Court advocates in the country.

Her nomination was also filibustered more than a year ago by Senate Republicans after the National Rifle Association sent them a letter complaining that she argued a position in court that the NRA disagrees with.

A lot has happened since then, however. The NRA spent the months after the Sandy Hook massacre engaged in what appears to be a very skillfully crafted campaign to eradicate its own credibility. The NRA went silent for a week after this tragedy occurred, only to send their CEO Wayne LaPierre forth from his bunker to claim that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” More recently, LaPierre published an op-ed warning that a breakdown of civilization is coming, but you may not be around to see it because Latino gangs are also out to get you, and so is al-Qaeda, and the only way to save yourself is to buy a gun. The NRA’s opposition to universal background checks is less popular than communism, polygamy or human cloning. There are literally more Americans that believe they have personally seen a UFO than agree with the NRA’s stance on background checks.

And yet the highest ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee still believes he should follow the NRA’s lead on judges. Earlier this week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) announced he would rekindle the filibuster against Halligan when she comes to the Senate floor because “she’s got gun problems.” Grassley previously cited the NRA’s opposition to Halligan in a statement explaining why he was filibustering her.

In case there is any doubt, the NRA’s case against Halligan is exceptionally weak. As Solicitor General of New York, Halligan’s job was to advocate on behalf of the state’s legal positions whether she agreed with them or not. New York took a position that departs from the NRA’s maximalist views on guns, and Halligan did her job by arguing her client’s position in court.

Simply put, a government attorney’s arguments on behalf of the government they represent says virtually nothing about how they actually view a particular legal issue. President George W. Bush’s first Solicitor General, Ted Olson, successfully defended campaign finance reform while he was in the Justice Department, only to convince five justices to destroy most of our campaign finance regime when he argued Citizens United. Bush’s second Solicitor General, Paul Clement, argued and won one of the strongest cases establishing that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional when he was in the government, and then spent more than a year undermining his victory once he was hired to claim that health reform is unconstitutional. So attacking Halligan for her gun arguments is a bit like attacking conservative movement’s top lawyer for being too friendly to Obamacare.

Ultimately, however, it shouldn’t be surprising that the NRA’s case against Halligan doesn’t hold water — this is, after all, an organization that believes we must arm ourselves to defend against scary Latinos and the collapse of civil society. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that Grassley appears willing to give a group that holds these views a veto power over judges.

Nation Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre’s recent op-ed, which argues that guns are necessary because civilization is on the verge of collapse and also we’re all in danger of being killed by terrorists and violent Latinos, has been widely mocked. Yet, buried in LaPierre’s fantasies about a Mad Max landscape where the only thing standing between a man and certain death at the hands of swarthy gang members is his trusty assault rifle, is a fairly detailed road map explaining how the NRA will protect future residents of this dystopia from the scourge of universal background checks.

Item #1 on his list — file a blizzard of lawsuits while the judiciary is still controlled by the kind of judges who think there’s absolutely no difference between a corporation and a human being:

[W]e are going to devise legal capability like never before. I fervently hope that President Obama does not get to appoint another anti-gun Supreme Court justice like Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan. But he probably will, and we must meet that challenge. His chances of appointing a replacement for one of the five pro-rights justices in the 5-4 Heller and McDonald majorities are high. And there’s no doubt he is going to appoint a huge number of new judges to lifetime positions in the lower federal courts.

That means the federal courts are going to get worse and worse. So some cases, on which we might have improved our chances of victory by waiting a while, are going to have to be brought now.

It should be noted that the NRA isn’t just trying to lock in victories with the judge’s they have, they’ve also demanded a veto power over new judges — and Republicans appear all too eager to give it to them. In 2011, Senate Republicans voted almost unanimously to filibuster a nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit named Caitlan Halligan. Although the GOP’s case against Halligan was thin, their top argument against her was that she is unfit for the bench because she argued a position the NRA disagrees with when she was Solicitor General of New York.

Yesterday, the Senate voted 88-12 to confirm Judge William Kayatta Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Kayatta, who President Obama nominated for this job more than a year ago, is the first federal appellate judge confirmed since Senate Republicans unilaterally declared they would block every single appellate nominee — regardless of their background or qualifications — last June.

In June, Republicans falsely claimed that the opposition party has historically blocked court of appeals nominees during the six months before a presidential election, and thus they were justified in obstructing Obama’s nominees. In reality, the Senate confirmed appellate judges during the pre-election period in every single recent election year except for President Clinton’s first term. President Reagan had 7 appellate judges confirmed during the six months before his reelection, and the first President Bush also saw 7 of his appellate judges confirmed in the half year before he was defeated by Clinton.

Notably, Republicans did not remove their blockade during the lame duck period even after President Obama was reelected.

Two years ago, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lamented that if she were nominated today to her current job on the Supreme Court, her “ACLU connection would probably disqualify” her from being confirmed. Before becoming a judge, Ginsburg led the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, where she was literally the single most important women’s rights attorney in American history. As Dahlia Lithwick explains, Ginsburg “almost single-handedly convinced the courts and legislatures to do away with gender classifications” in a range of cases and ushered in modern constitutional doctrine protecting women in the process.

At an event sponsored by the San Diego Association of Business Trial Lawyers on Friday, Ginsburg offered even stronger words of condemnation for our broken senate-confirmation process:

There were only three votes in opposition when she was confirmed to the court by the Senate, but in the past she has said that she doubts if in today’s more partisan political environment if she would be confirmed for the court.

She said Friday that she was hopeful that someday soon the partisan battles over court nominees will fade.

“I’m hoping there will be members of Congress who will say enough. We are destroying the United States’ reputation in the world as a beacon of democracy, and we should go back to the way it was, and the way it should be,” she said of the confirmation process.

It is likely that Ginsburg’s Court will soon take up a lower court’s decision that effectively eliminated the president’s power to make recess appointments. This decision came in the wake of an effort by Senate Republicans to effectively shut down entire federal agencies by filibustering anyone nominated to head them. A Supreme Court opinion reversing that lower court’s error will do little to address the problem of filibusters preventing judges from receiving lifetime appointments to the federal bench, but it will cut off the Senate GOP’s attempt to destroy entire agencies despite controlling neither the White House nor the Senate majority.