Washington, D.C. –The American people should know that Senate Democrats are preventing would-be federal judges from being fairly judged. As a consequence, the people who use our courts are suffering, according to U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.

Enzi and his Republican colleagues embarked on a 30-hour marathon debate Wednesday night aimed at drawing attention to the ongoing Democrat filibuster of some of President Bush's judicial nominees. Enzi took his turn presiding over the Senate from 11 p.m. until 2:30 a.m. this morning and plans to preside again tonight from 10 p.m. to midnight (EST).

Enzi has no objection to senators voting "no" on nominees, but he does object to the prevention of the Senate from giving its advice and consent as prescribed in the Constitution. Prior to this year, never in American history has a true filibuster defeated a judicial nominee.

"The travesty here is not that members of the Senate are voting down judicial nominees. They have that right as senators. The injustice is that Democrats are not allowing senators to approve or disapprove nominees by a majority vote. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are twisting the system in a way that no party has ever done in the history of the Senate," said Enzi.

Senate Democrats have blocked at least four high-level judicial nominees from getting a vote on the Senate floor. Enzi said the number of judges the minority is holding up is not as important as the method they are employing and what use of that method means to the future of the confirmation process.

"The minority isn't objecting to these judges because they are not qualified. They are objecting to these judges because they are ideologically aligned with the President that nominated them. That's no shocker or at least it wasn't until now," said Enzi. "For 200 hundred years minorities voted their consciences, but they also allowed those in the majority to vote theirs. That changed when this group of minority senators suddenly decided that it should take 60 instead of 51 votes to confirm a judge."

At the end of the 30 hours, probably sometime Friday, there will be votes on three nominees – Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown and California state Judge Carolyn Kuhl. Under a parliamentary move called "cloture," 60 votes would be required to shut off a filibuster and move to an up-or-down vote on a nominee. Justice Owen's nomination has been filibustered and Democrats have threatened to filibuster the nominations of Justice Brown and Judge Kuhl.

Enzi said cloture votes on nominees have previously been taken in the Senate and show the nominees have bipartisan support of more than a majority, "which is all it has ever taken to confirm a judge in the past."

Besides Owen and Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, who was nominated by President Bush to fill a vacancy on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Democrats are filibustering the nomination of U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering of Mississippi. Hispanic lawyer Miguel Estrada withdrew his nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit following a Democrat filibuster.