Bill Frist, on the floor of the Senate, on his filibuster of Clinton Appeals Court nominee Richard Paez:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

SEN. FRIST: The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination - we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe - a point - and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

The issue is not cloture votes per se, it’s the partisan, leadership-led use of cloture votes to kill - to defeat - to assassinate these nominees. That’s the difference. Cloture has been used in the past on this floor to postpone, to get more info, to ask further questions.

Really, Bill?  To paraphrase a great blogger, Sadly, no!  Paez had been pending for four years when Frist voted against clouture.  Here's a record of the vote. The sponsor of the filibuster, Sen. Smith of New Hampshire made it clear why they were voting to block the nomination:  to block it:

Senator Bob Smith (R-N.H.) today led the fight on the Senate floor to block the nominations of two activist Clinton judicial nominees.

I watched this fool debate Byrd and Reid on the same issue last week.  The argument was all hot air and nothing else.  At core, the man knows what he is doing is morally wrong.