Now a filibuster of Halligan's nomination has been threatened, forcing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to schedule a cloture vote for this Tuesday, Dec. 6, in an effort to allow an up-or-down vote on Halligan's confirmation to proceed.
Lithwick notes that Halligan's detractors in the Senate used a a sentence fragment from one piece of Halligan's work -- a legal opinion about same-sex marriage in New York state -- taken out of context, to show her as an extremist.
Weighted estimates of constraint were obtained by a method similar to the approach of Halligan and Keightley (2006).
Therefore, differences in GC content between species pairs were accounted for by replacing Nneut with the expected number of substitutions (Nexp) that was calculated from ARs following the method of Halligan et al. (2004).
Still, the move signals that Mr. Obama has not given up on Ms. Halligan and raises the possibility that Mr. Srinivasan could at least have a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing before the end of the year, increasing his chances of getting through the process in 2013 if Mr. Obama is re-elected.
But those changes have done little so far this session to curb filibusters, as evidenced by the vote on Ms. Halligan and the politically charged obstacles raised to confirmation votes on Mr. Brennan and Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator who found himself on the receiving end of a Republican filibuster before winning confirmation as secretary of defense.
The largely party-line vote, with only Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, joining with Democrats in favor of ending debate, was reminiscent of the previous filibuster of Ms. Halligan — another largely party line vote of 54 to 45.
Democrats fell short of the required 60-vote threshold to end debate and bring Halligan's nomination to a vote, with only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) breaking from her party in support of invoking cloture.
But the failure to end debate on Ms. Halligan's nomination was arguably more consequential, given its potential to renew the fight over rules governing filibusters and how the Senate handles high-level judicial nominations.
