Senate Showdown Begins; Women in Combat; Syria and the War on Terror
ANNOUNCER: The curtain rises on a long-awaited duel. Not the "Star Wars" movie, but the battle over judges in the Senate.</s>SEN. BILL FRIST, (R) TENNESSEE, SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: Let's do our duty and vote. Judicial nominees deserve an up-or-down vote.</s>SEN. HARRY REID, (D) NEVADA, SENATE MINORITY LEADER: The only check on President Bush is the Democrats' ability to voice their concern in this body of the Senate.</s>ANNOUNCER: Who's figuring into the big fight on the Hill? We'll talk with major players and profile one of the judges who has the Senate so stirred up. A political landslide in Los Angeles pushes the mayor out and gives his challenger a bigger mandate than many expected.</s>ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA (D), LOS ANGELES MAYOR-ELECT: I accept this victory, knowing that the challenges ahead are very big.</s>ANNOUNCER: Now, live from Washington, Judy Woodruff's INSIDE POLITICS.</s>JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you for joining us. It is D- Day in the U.S. Senate. The long-expected showdown over judicial nominees is now underway. Members have been debating for hours about one of the president's most controversial choices. But so far, the trigger has not been pulled on what Democrats call the nuclear option and Republicans call the constitutional option. Let's go to our congressional correspondent Joe Johns -- Joe.</s>JOE JOHNS, CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Judy, this debate has been pretty bitter at times through the morning and now into the afternoon. Of course, on the floor, under consideration, the nomination of Priscilla Owen for an appeals court position. Right now, you can see Senator Max Baucus talking. Within the last hour, Senate Democrats joined with some of their House colleagues on the steps of the United States Capitol, a show of solidarity, essentially. Now, on the debate, some of the language has been almost harsh, by standards. Senate Majority Leader Frist speaking of votes to cut off debate on judicial nominees, comparing it to killing an assassination. And Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois tried to call him on it...</s>WOODRUFF: Joe?</s>JOHNS: ... on the Senate floor.</s>WOODRUFF: Joe, we're going to have to interrupt and quickly go over to another part of the Hill, where the defense secretary is talking to reporters.</s>DONALD RUMSFELD, U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: There's a couple of things that are unusual right now. One is that there isn't a battlefield line. It's an asymmetrical battlefield. And so there are not clear lines where a battle's taking place on one side and not on the other. A second thing that's unusual is that the Army is in the process of reorganizing and moving capabilities from the division level down to the brigade and the battalion level. So those two moving parts create a situation where the Army is reviewing how they do things, and they're working with the Congress and they're working with the battlefield commanders to find an appropriate way that's consistent with our country's view on that subject. There's a law. There are rules and procedures. And the question is: How do they apply with these two new moving parts?</s>QUESTION: How would it affect Army operations if women were removed from the forward support...</s>RUMSFELD: I don't think I'm going to get into the hypotheticals. I'd rather wait and see how the Army sorts that out.</s>QUESTION: We're dealing with a real-life crisis, it's not a hypothetical. What do you think would be the impact of this if you took women away that are serving honorably and courageously?</s>RUMSFELD: You are presuming that could happen. And what I'm saying is the Army is considering these things as to how best to do it, and at some point they will have a written declaratory statement that presents their conclusions in a manner that will be understandable by certainly the people in the Army and certainly the people outside the Army.</s>QUESTION: So you're going to wait and see?</s>RUMSFELD: I'm not just sitting around waiting. I'm having meetings with them and discussing it.</s>QUESTION: What you are telling -- when you are talking to Chairman Hunter, what is your position on this issue?</s>RUMSFELD: My position is that I want to learn and get better informed so that I can participate in the discussion on the thing in an intelligent way.</s>QUESTION: Have you seen reports that Abu Zarqawi had a meeting about a month ago with his lieutenants in Syria, and does that account for the current surge in violence right now that's going on?</s>GENERAL JOHN ABIZAID, COMMANDER, U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND: I saw the reports. I can't really confirm or deny whether the reports are correct. But clearly, we do know that there are activities that are taking place in Syria, not with the collusion of the Syrian government, but that are activities that are insurgent-inspired that are taking place over there. It's very important that the Syrian government do everything within its power to keep violence from migrating or being planned in Syria into Iraq.</s>QUESTION: Do you think that the Syrian government is doing enough?</s>ABIZAID: No, I do not think the Syrian government is doing enough.</s>QUESTION: Have you been briefed on the latest Zarqawi recording that's been released? Have you all heard that?</s>ABIZAID: Yes, I have.</s>QUESTION: How do you respond?</s>ABIZAID: I have no response to it. It's the same old thing. He says that it's OK to kill Muslims and that's it's an Islamic duty, and he's incorrect. That's not true.</s>GENERAL RICHARD MYERS, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: Think about it -- what he says is it's OK for Muslims to kill Muslims, and not just any Muslims but innocents, men, women and children. And that's what he's been doing. If you look at the statistics over the last couple of weeks, a lot of Iraqi men, women and children have died because this violent extremist is trying to convince others to do it. I mean, that's a -- talk about a guy that just has absolutely no moral foundation. It's an outrage.</s>QUESTION: What's he up to? Is he trying to provoke a civil war?</s>MYERS: Absolutely. He's already said it. He said he's trying to provoke a civil war. He's trying to keep freedom from happening in the Middle East.</s>MYERS: He is a violent extremist aligned with UBL. That's all clear, well documented. And that's clearly what they want to do -- and they'll go to any lengths, they'll run into the World Trade Center or they'll kill several hundred Iraqi men, women and children in the last couple of weeks. It's an absolutely outrageous. He's a criminal for sure. Probably worse, if we had a...</s>QUESTION: ... these tactics that he's using might actually be making some progress in moving that country too close toward a civil war, which is obviously...</s>MYERS: Me, personally, no. The Iraqi government is strong, and the Iraqi public, in the recent polling, shows that they're strong as well and understand what this is all about. The Iraqi public is as outraged as the world is -- and should be -- against his tactics and his methods.</s>ABIZAID: People like Zarqawi and bin Laden are regarded by the whole region as being extremists. The people out there don't want them to win. They have no vision of the future. It's just a dark, dark way ahead. People don't believe in them and they don't want them to win. They want to enable their own government to win the battle, and that's why the Iraqis are going to win on their own.</s>RUMSFELD: It may not be newsworthy, but the reality is that, in many parts of that section of the world, moderates are prevailing. And in the struggle between the extremists and the moderates in that faith, if you look in Afghanistan, you look in Iraq, you look in other parts of the region, the Palestinian Authority had an election -- there are things happening that are encouraging that suggest that there is a movement toward moderation, as opposed to extremism.</s>QUESTION: General Abizaid, we are in a tough fight in Iraq. Wouldn't it have a devastating effect on the Army to remove women from forward-support companies?</s>ABIZAID: I really can't comment on that at all. I have just come from the region. I'm not involved in the debate right now. We're looking at it. I'll have to wait to get my instructions from the department.</s>MYERS: The fact is, it is a debate. There is a policy.</s>MYERS: We're following the policy as it stands. There's a debate going on. We all want to become better informed. And so that stuff is a ways off.</s>QUESTION: General Myers, can you put your finger on the Afghanistan riots, what caused them? Do you think it was the Newsweek article? Do you think there were other factors involved?</s>MYERS: I have not talked to General Eikenberry since. But what I said was that his initial thoughts, based on what he knew at the time -- and there was lots of caveats there -- that he thought that the political unrest had been previously planned as was more about internal Afghan politics. I think we can obviously go on to say that it was probably fueled. But you'll have to ask him. I think he'd probably say that once it gets going, of course, anything can fuel unrest like that, and perhaps that article did. I don't know for a fact. I just don't know. It certainly wasn't helpful. Inaccurate reporting like that is not helpful in that part of the world when we're trying our best and we have our men and women in uniform and our DOD civilians and State Department people and people from Treasury and Justice trying to help people have a better life. It's not helpful when you have inaccurate reporting that incites people to violence. It's just not helpful.</s>QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, can you talk a little bit about what you're doing here and what you may have discussed earlier today over at the White House?</s>RUMSFELD: We had a meeting, General Abiziad and General Craddock and I and General Myers had a meeting with the president. We do that every week, I do. And we obviously talked about this hemisphere and we talked about the Central Command's</s>AOR. QUESTION: What's on the agenda today?</s>RUMSFELD: Well, I meet with the members of the Senate and the members of the House every period of weeks, five, six weeks. And General Myers and I generally brief. And when General Abizaid is in town, he comes along. Last time, I think General Barno came along and talked about Afghanistan. And there are always 50, 60-plus members of the United States Senate who ask questions. And we have a chance on a classified basis to discuss things that are important to them and important to the country.</s>QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, nobody says anymore -- has any progress been made in finding Osama bin Laden?</s>RUMSFELD: I will make sure we let you know when we find him.</s>QUESTION: Any progress being made at all?</s>RUMSFELD: When you're hunting for someone, and you haven't found them, you haven't found them. And at some point, we will find him. And at the moment, we haven't.</s>ABIZAID: Mr. Secretary, if I may -- let me just say, we've made an awful lot of progress against al Qaeda as an organization. That's a very important point for people to understand. And when I say "we", I mean we the international community, we with our Pakistani partners, we with the United States military and the interagency of the United States.</s>WOODRUFF: We've been listening to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and also General John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, answering reporters' questions at the Capitol, after they met with Senators and members of the House, answering questions primarily about Iraq and also about Afghanistan. Now, we want to turn back to the story we are following today on Capitol Hill, and that is the president's judicial nominees -- nominees to the federal courts of appeals. There has been an effort to come up with a compromise between Republicans and Democrats. So far, that has not resulted in success, but right now we want to talk to one of those who's been involved in trying to reach an agreement. He is Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Senator, thank you very much for joining us.</s>SEN. BEN NELSON (D), NEBRASKA: Thank you, Judy.</s>WOODRUFF: Senator, where does everything stand? Now that they are debating on the floor of the Senate, the nomination of Judge Priscilla Owen, that would seem to suggest that efforts to work out a deal have failed?</s>NELSON: No, I don't think so at all. I think the efforts are ongoing, even as we speak, at the moment. I've stepped out of a meeting so that we could give you an update. We continue to talk, to dialogue, also to wordsmith, to try to find areas of agreement. I can't tell you we're real close, but I can tell you we continue to get closer with every discussion.</s>WOODRUFF: But, now that Judge Owen is before the Senate, aren't you inevitably going to face -- I mean, she's going to be filibustered by the Democrats. There's going to be a call for a so-called cloture vote to stop the debate, to stop the filibuster, and at that point, aren't you facing the so-called nuclear option, changing the rules by the Republicans?</s>NELSON: Well, that could happen, but I don't know that that will happen. I think that the whole effort on getting an agreement is to get up or down votes wherever possible. And that's certainly going to be the commitment with respect to the previous judges as well as new judges, and that's what the agreement is all about, to try to find a way to get more up-or-down votes, except in extraordinary circumstances, and I'm not sure that for enough individuals, she would constitute an extraordinary circumstance for -- to vote for the filibuster to vote against cloture. There probably will be quite a few votes against her, but that's different than the filibuster.</s>WOODRUFF: Has -- have enough Republicans now agreed that they're willing to let some of these judges go by the wayside, some of the seven who have been proposed?</s>NELSON: Well, I don't know that anybody is going to go by the wayside. There may be some names that don't come forward. There may be names that don't come out of the committee. I think those are all decisions that are going to be made by others. But I don't know that there's a belief here that anybody's going to go by the wayside. There just may be some that aren't brought forward. I don't think we know at this point in time.</s>WOODRUFF: Well, how is this going to get decided, Senator?</s>NELSON: Well, I think it's going to get decided because there is going to be agreement for more up-or-down votes based on the fact that filibuster will be only used in extraordinary circumstances. On the other hand, the -- we will agree that there will not be a vote for the nuclear option where rules change, a constitutional change, whatever their description is, as long as we continue to work together and try to get up-or-down votes. I think there will be a suspension of any effort on the up-or-down -- or, the nuclear option.</s>WOODRUFF: So, bottom line, it looks like, I mean -- every, all the reports we're seeing are that four of the president's seven judicial nominees, the Democrats are about ready to let that many go through. Is that right?</s>NELSON: Well, I can't tell you the details of it right now because they're not finalized. When they are finalized, I think it will be fairly apparent that there are agreements of that -- of a similar kind. But I can't confirm the number or the identity of any of the judges in that category.</s>WOODRUFF: All right, Senator Ben Nelson who's been heavily involved in trying to work out a compromise. We thank you very much for talking to us.</s>NELSON: Thank you, Judy.</s>WOODRUFF: Thank you, and I know we'll be seeing you in the days to come. At the top of the hour, we want to let everyone watching know that we'll be talking with a Republican involved in some of these efforts at a compromise, Senator Arlen Specter of the state of Pennsylvania. Well, if Senator -- If Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats aren't feeling the heat now, the White House is warning they will, if they pursuit filibuster fight to a point they are slowing down Senate business.</s>SCOTT MCCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I think it would have consequences for the Democratic leadership in the United States Senate, if they continued to hold up progress on the important priorities for the American people. American people elected us to get things done. The American people want to see us work together on important priorities. The president has reached out across partisan lines in order to find solutions to our pressing priorities. Senate Democrats have been standing in the way of progress on some of those important priorities and that's the president's view.</s>WOODRUFF: Hours before the fight over judges was set into motion today, President Bush used a Republican party gala to again plead his case for his nominees.</s>PRES. GEORGE BUSH, UNITED STATES: And speaking about judges -- in the last two elections, the American people made clear they want judges who faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench. I have a duty to nominate well-qualified men and women to the federal judiciary. I have done just that and will continue to do so. The Senate also has a duty to promptly consider each of these nominees on the Senate floor, discuss and debate their qualifications and then give them the up-or-down vote they deserve.</s>WOODRUFF: President Bush, making his case at last night's Republican party fund-raiser where they raised at least $15 million. So, let's go back to the Hill, quickly, now, to our Joe Johns. And Joe, I'm so sorry we had to interrupt to you a few minutes ago to listen to the defense secretary and others. They were on the Hill talking about Iraq. We just heard from Senator Ben Nelson. What is your sense of where things stand?</s>JOHNS: Well, the first thing I think you have to say is it's been rough stuff out on the Senate floor, really interesting to hear senators and their tone, the kind of language they're using. As an example of that, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on the floor, speaking of cloture votes, the votes to cut off debate, compared it to assassination and killing of these judicial nominees, and was confronted on that on the Senate floor by Dick Durbin, the senator -- the Democratic senator from Illinois.</s>FRIST: The issue is that we have leadership-led, partisan filibusters that have obstructed not one nominee but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, in a routine way. The issue is not cloture votes, per se. It's the partisan, leadership-led use of cloture vote to kill, to defeat, to assassinate, these nominees. And that's the difference.</s>SEN. DICK DURBIN (D), MINORITY WHIP: When words are expressed during the course of the debate that those of us who oppose these nominees are setting out to kill, to defeat or to assassinate these nominees, those words should be taken from this record. Those words are inappropriate. Those words go too far.</s>JOHNS: On balance, do you have to say some of the toughest rhetoric on the Senate floor today has come from Democratic senators like Barbara Boxer of California, also Patrick Leahy of Vermont. A couple of other notes -- you had Senator Nelson on just a couple minutes ago. We have a bit more intell on that: we're told, about 11 senators inside a meeting in the office of Virginia Senator John Warner, the Republican. Seven Republicans, five Democrats. The goal, obviously, to come up with a bipartisan compromise that 12 senators could sign, presumably, six Democrats, six Republicans, to try to head off this showdown over the nuclear option and to allow through a certain number, still undetermined, of the president's judicial nominees. Judy?</s>WOODRUFF: So, Joe, that would work if they just had that number?</s>JOHNS: Well, it apparently would work, because, you know, the point of it is, if you have to have a certain number of votes to get anything done on this, and you need 51 votes, presumably, to go forward with the nuclear option, six Republicans saying no would take away the 51. That's the main thing, of course. And then Democrats on the other side would be able to say, well, we're not going to filibuster. And there's some type of an agreement in there, they hope. But final language is the big question. And Senator John Warner -- it's very interesting that he's involved, of course. Republican from Virginia. He has stood up to the Republican leadership here before.</s>WOODRUFF: Bottom line -- I know we all get caught up in these numbers -- bottom line is each side wants to have its say over which judges get confirmed. All right, Joe Johns, thanks very much. Joe at the Capitol. Well, if Minority Leader Reid is trying to assess any fall-out from the fight over judges and filibusters, he might want to check out some new poll numbers from his home state. A Mason Dixon poll shows 56 percent of Nevada residents approve of the job Reid is doing in the Senate. But just over half of those they say disapprove of Reid's leading role in blocking some of the president's judicial nominees. At the center of the Senate battle, a soft-spoken judge who also teaches Sunday school. Why is Priscilla Owen such a lightning rod? The answer ahead. And later, a true Hollywood story. Some of the hottest young stars are rallying behind a would-be presidential contender.