Judging Judgemental Dems
It’s about time I weigh in on the Senate battle over the President’s judicial nominees.
Many people are too busy to really follow the dust up, so allow me to explain in plain English what’s going on.
President Bush, per the Constitution, has appointed judges to federal courts, but those appointments have been blocked by Democrats.
This is where it gets tricky. The Dems are not voting against these Judges on an up or down vote, which would be their right; oh no, what their doing is blocking the very ability to bring these judges to a vote.
They’re doing it via a filibuster. What is a filibuster?
To protect the rights of the minority party, the Senate has a rule that a senator can keep talking indefinitely (which they have no trouble doing, as long as the cameras are rolling: see Joe Biden), thereby forestalling a vote on legislation.
Key phase there: “a vote on legislation.”
The filibuster, while a senate prerogative, has been used to stall a vote on legislation.
Never before has it been used the way Democrats are now using it, to block a vote on judges.
A judicial appointment has never needed more than a 51-49 majority, until now.
To override a filibuster, you need 60 votes.
So by changing custom, the Dems have made a de facto change in senate rules.
This brings us to the so-called “nuclear option,” which simply is the plan that Republicans have to use their MAJORITY to codify in senate rules that the filibuster will allow, as always, its use against legislation, but not its never intended use against judicial appointees.
So as usual, the disintegrating Democrat party is trying to get their way by changing 225 years of precedence, not at the ballot box, but by back door chicanery.
The great thing about the Dems is they never learn.
In the 2004 elections, Democrat minority leader Tom Daschle, a man who made obstruction his trademark, became the first minority leader to lose his seat since 1952.
He’s now back in South Dakota kicking dirt.
So keep up the obstruction Dems, you’ll all have real jobs by Dec. 2006.
posted by commonsense2 | 1:35 PM
3 Comments:
It's not true to say that blocking judicial appointments by filibuster is unprecedented. Republicans commonly did it to Clinton appointees when they were in the minority; and it wasn't new then, either.
Try this for irony: one of Bush's filibustered appointees, Richard Griffin, is the son of former US Senator Robert Griffin (R-Mich), a Republican who led a filibuster in 1968 to deny Lyndon Johnson's nomination of Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The minority Republicans hoped to delay the nomination until the next year, in hopes that Nixon would win the election and appoint a more conservative judge to the position.
It's an old tactic. And you should know that the Democrats have voted on and approved of a higher percentage of Bush's appointees to the bench than the Republicans did for Clinton. A recent Washington Post poll shows that 66% of the public opposes Frist's "Nuclear Option" to change the rules on filibusters, too.
In defense of frightwig's comments, yes the Abe Fortas deal was a complete anomaly.
But i still stand by this, no other judicial nomination has ever been held up "in committee" by a filibuster.
If I am wrong, tell me where and I'll research it.
Who writes under Anonymous? Come up w a fake name.
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