Is Frist Going to End Filibusters of Nominations?

Working For Change -- Republicans have been happy to make this claim on nominations when Democrats were in the White House. They famously used a filibuster to kill Lyndon Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortas as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1968. They had no qualms about using the filibuster to kill President Clinton's nomination of Henry Foster as Surgeon General in 1995. Sam Brown, a leader of the movement against the Vietnam War, saw his ambassador-level nomination to head the American delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe blocked by a filibuster in 1994.

And filibusters aside, Republicans certainly didn't defer to all of Clinton's judicial nominations. Fifty-five Clinton judicial nominees never got a hearing and 10 more never got a vote in the Judiciary Committee.

San Francisco Chronicle -- The Frist Proposal

Under the Frist plan, it would take 60 votes to stop a filibuster on the first try, 57 on the second, 54 on the third and 51 on the fourth. The entire process would take about 13 days, he said.

He said his proposal was modeled after a broader plan, made by Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Tom Harkin of Iowa in 1995.