Bush said he was forced to use his constitutional authority because, "a minority of Democratic senators has been using unprecedented obstructionist tactics to prevent him and other qualified individuals from receiving up-or-down votes. Their tactics are inconsistent with the Senate's constitutional responsibility and are hurting our judicial system."

Senate Democrats argued that Pickering did not deserve elevation to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because he wrote an article as a young man recommending ways to strengthen Mississippi's anti-miscegenation laws; left the Democratic Party in 1964 when it split along racial lines and, more recently, presided over a 1994 trial in which he took extraordinary steps to reduce the sentence of a man convicted
in a cross-burning incident.

Democrats, who have asserted that Bush has been trying to pack the federal courts with staunch conservative ideologues, blocked some nominees during his first two years in office when they controlled the Senate. When Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2002 by a narrow margin, Democrats then resorted to the threat of filibusters, or extended debates, to block the nominees. Although Republicans held 51 seats, a slim majority, they could not muster the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

Mr. Bush and Republican senators replied that the judge's record was being distorted. They said that in recent decades he had been a force for racial reconciliation in his home state and had strong support among local African-Americans. His actions in the cross-burning case, they said, were motivated by a sense that prosecutors had mishandled the case and let the principal offender off lightly.