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Democrats’ Move to Limit Debate on Courthouse Violence Bill Could Get Snagged
By Keith Perine
Congressional Quarterly
April 16, 2007
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid moved Monday to limit debate on a motion to proceed to legislation aimed at reducing courthouse violence.
The bipartisan measure (S 378) by Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., would expand a law that bars firearms in federal courthouses to include “other dangerous weapons.” It also would renew and broaden the authority of the court system to remove some personal information from public financial disclosure reports for judges.
Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said he had placed a hold on the bill because it would authorize new appropriations without offsetting decreases in spending elsewhere.
The legislation authorizes $20 million per fiscal year from 2007 to 2011 for the U.S. Marshals Service to protect the judiciary, and $20 million per fiscal year over the same period for state, local and tribal grants for witness-protection and victim-protection programs.
Although the bill has a bipartisan list of cosponsors, it could get tangled up in a burgeoning partisan Senate procedural battle. Reid, D-Nev., has filed a series of petitions to limit debate, or invoke cloture, on several pieces of legislation.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said, “The purpose of filing cloture early is to end debate and accelerate the passage of a measure. But abusing this privilege has the opposite effect. If the minority is shut out of debate, it will block legislation until its members are respected and their voices given an opportunity to be heard.”
A broader House measure (HR 660) that is similar to the Senate bill also is pending. But on Feb. 28, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill (HR 1130) that would restore until 2009 the authority for redacting disclosure forms, which expired in 2005. Lawmakers said they wanted to move the narrower bill first to quickly restore the lapsed redacting authority.
Two high-profile, violent episodes two years ago, one of which involved a federal judge in Illinois and the other a Georgia courthouse, gave initial momentum to the legislation.
In February 2005, a man killed U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow’s husband and mother in Chicago and then committed suicide. He left a note saying he was upset because the judge had dismissed his medical malpractice suit.
In March 2005, a defendant in an Atlanta rape case gunned down Superior Court Judge Rowland W. Barnes, a court reporter and a deputy as he tried to escape from the Fulton County courthouse.
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