Merkley On Anti-Choice Justices

Over at Ezra Klein's national politics blog, fellow blogger Neil describes a recent conference call with Jeff Merkley. In the call, Merkley laid out his position on filibustering anti-choice Supreme Court nominees:

I asked Merkley some tough questions in the conference call, and he answered them fairly well. I wanted to ask questions which would elicit new information that people couldn't just find out by looking at his website, his past voting record, or news articles.

...I got to ask him another pointed question. "If we're unfortunate enough to end up with a Republican president in 2009 and one of our pro-choice justices leaves the Supreme Court, can we count on you to oppose nominees who would overturn Roe V. Wade, even if it requires a filibuster?"

At first, Merkley responded in very general terms. He was saying good things about how we need to fight back against right-wing attempts to pack the Court, but he didn't specifically address the scenario I'd raised. ...

[Later,] he said that he wanted to be completely clear on the issue, and announced, "I am absolutely willing to filibuster anti-choice judges." Score one for you, big guy...

Read the rest and comment over at Ezra Klein's blog.

Nov. 26, 2007 Posted in elsewhere.