Judicial Filibuster

George W Bush 2004 called to pwn you brah

*snort*

get your facts straight

 

Nathan should better educate himself.

 

I stand corrected, I didn't think he busted 50%, it turns out he made 50.7 that year.

*congrats*

Hopefully this victory stays fresh in your mind for the future.

 

to be clear

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...reasons-the-filibuster-change-is-a-huge-deal/

 

All in favor of ending the filibuster, but spare us the selective outrage.

This is an act of raw power by Reid. His only guiding principle is whatever it takes to reach an end. If he's in the minority, he supports filibusters. If he's in the majority, he opposes them.

It wouldn't surprise me if this rule change expires in 2014/2016. That's how shameless he is.

 

It would be rather surprising to me, given Senate Rule V

2. The rules of the Senate shall continue from one Congress to the next Congress unless they are changed as provided in these rules.

 

Err, the Senate GOP conducted a power grab by refusing to allow the Senate to perform its basic constitutional duties simply because the Senate GOP didn't want them to. This is not a case of the GOP opposing judges because they weren't qualified or for any philosophical disagreement. This was the GOP opposing judges simply because they decided that a court didn't need some judges - they've openly admitted that. It's not the Senate GOP's right to decide to reduce the number of judges that sit on a court. That is an attempted power grab from the Executive Branch's role in filling out government positions and from the Judicial Branch's ability to function.

So Reid grabbed the power back. If the GOP can't function as a governing party, then it's up to everyone else to find ways to make the government function.

 

Read somewhere that there are roughly 90 seats that have not been filled by presidential appointments. 3 of those 90 were for the DC circuit. Obama was willing to let the other 87 go if the GOP would have relented on just those three.

But now, Obama has the powered to fill all 90 seats!

Way to go GOP! You abused the filibuster to the point of now having 90 new libtard judges instead of just 3.

 

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/INpeklsK6oA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

Best commentary I've seen on this so far-


Charlie Brown just said "**** it" and kicked Lucy.

 

Wingnuts played with fire and got burnt.

 

This chart explains the move by the Democratic Party. Republicans brought this on themselves. Whether this was a good move for Democrats to respond to what has easily been an historic number of filibusters, filibusters that had nothing to do with the qualifications of the nominees, is something history will tell us over time.






The reason I am posting in a thread started by someone I have on ignore is due to the thread having been started before said member earned his way on to my list.

 

They are not there to govern

 

It wasn't that long ago that the Republicans were saying they had a permanent majority.

 

The Democrats have invoked the Nuclear Option.

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_new...mb-so-what-happens-next?lite&ocid=msnhp&pos=1

Democrats drop the 'nuclear' bomb, so what happens next?

Washington entered a new era on Thursday when the Senate voted to invoke the “nuclear option,” a technical change to an existing chamber rule that is sure to worsen the acrimony and further the divide between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

It’s known as the “nuclear option” because of the broad and serious implications of its deployment. It calls to mind the Cold War, when a nuclear strike by the United States or Soviet Union against the other would all but result in mutually-assured destruction.

The move, which overturned the requirement for a 60-vote majority for most presidential nominees, is an unprecedented power play by Democrats, and one that is sure to reverberate in both the long and short term.

Republicans warned before the vote that the GOP will retaliate should they re-take the majority.

"Some of us have been around here long enough to know that sometimes the shoe is on the other foot," Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said before the vote, telling Democrats "you may regret this a lot sooner than you think."

In the coming weeks, the acrimony could cause meaningful action in the Senate to grind to a halt.

More ominously, future majorities – Democratic or Republican – could use the new rules to run roughshod over the minority party not just for nominations, but most legislative matters.

Frustrated by sustained Republican efforts to block President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees for fear that the ideological balance of several influential courts could be tipped, Democrats took the unprecedented step of upending 200 years of Senate tradition.

Although Democratic and Republican leaders alike have threatened to invoke the “nuclear option” before, none have followed through on their threat until now.

Thursday’s vote “opens a Pandora's Box to further changes in the rules” on a range of issues said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

Following an ugly government shutdown fight that sent approval of Congress to new lows, Thursday’s vote effectively doubles-down on the brand of scorched-earth politics that have fueled public disgust toward Washington.

The vote was 52 to 48; with three Democrats breaking ranks to join with Republicans in opposition to the change.

It was just a handful of years ago that Reid and Democrats were crying foul at Senate Republicans’ similar effort to change Senate rules to allow easier confirmation of some of President George W. Bush’s judicial appointments, whom Democrats regarded as too conservative.

“I can say from experience that no one's hands are entirely clean on this issue,” Reid acknowledged on the Senate floor Thursday morning before forcing the vote.

Democrats had earlier threatened to invoke the nuclear option this summer, but backed off after a rare, bipartisan joint meeting of all senators. Their agreement to preserve the filibuster broke down, though, after Republicans blocked several of Obama’s appointments to the influential D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Though a majority of the Senate backed each nominee, Republicans insisted that those candidates clear a 60-vote threshold: a de-facto filibuster.

The GOP argued that the court simply didn’t need any more judges to handle its existing workload, rather than picking at the individual nominees' politics or qualifications. But there was an obvious concern that the ideological balance of the court system could be tipped by jurists selected by a Democratic president.

McConnell called Democrats’ move “a fake fight over judges that aren't even needed.”

What does seem certain after Thursday’s vote is that the Senate has entered a new era. The upper chamber has historically prided itself on the rules which distinguish it from the more raucous and sharply political House of Representatives. Specifically, the Senate has been defined by rules which empower the minority party to slow or stop legislation through procedural means, and this week’s rule change is a step toward eroding those rules once and for all.

While Thursday’s “nuclear option” is limited to executive branch and judicial nominees (except for Supreme Court picks), virtually no observer of Congress expects the collateral damage to stop there. Republicans basically broadcast their intention to force future confirmation GOP-selected high court nominees by a simple majority.
“If the Democrats are bent on changing the rules, go ahead,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Wednesday. “There are a lot more Scalias and Thomases out there we’d love to put on the bench.”

In the conservative blogosphere, Republican activists were practically giddy about the prospect of a Republican Senate forcing a vote to repeal Obamacare by a simple majority vote by changing the rules, and shutting out a Democratic attempt to use the filibuster to halt such an effort.

In the short-term, Republicans could threaten to further grind Senate proceedings to a halt, especially with a critical defense bill currently up for consideration and another budget and debt deadline looming early next year.

“Actions have consequences. There will be changes out of this,” Manley said, warning progressive activists who have long pushed for such a rules change. The 21-year veteran of Capitol Hill said it wasn’t a particularly proud day for the Senate, “but it may in fact be the only option necessary to rescue the U.S. Senate from its current predicament, where a determined minority can hold up bills important to the American people.”

 

Except if you read the beginning of this thread from 2005 you will see that the Republicans were arguing about how toxic the Democrats were then. The majority is always going to gripe about how the minority is obstructing. What has happened now is that when the Republicans take over they will just be more inclined to run roughshod over the Democrats.

Yes and 8 years ago it was the Republicans in charge. 8 years from now, actually possibly much sooner, they could be back in charge and I strongly suspect it will be the Democrats crying foul over the inability to filibuster.

 

The alternative was to allow Republicans to run roughshod over Democrats now. What do you believe is the proper solution when the other party unilateral decides that a President shouldn't have the power to appoint judges simply because they don't think a court needs more judges?

 

That was one ridiculous, concocted rationale. The reason, which they have been very upfront about, is that the Obama appointees would tilt the DC Appeals Court to a majority of Dem appointees. They never made the case against individual appointees on the merits, merely the fact that they would lose the majority on that court.

It should also be noted that Repubs have used the filibuster to prevent any appointee from staffing critical positions including the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau because by the law, some of the regulations must be signed by the head of CFPB and if no one has been appointed--voila!-- no regs.

 

While good, this chart does not tell the whole story as the number of bills that have anything to do with governing (as opposed to naming post offices and such) has declined during the same period because everyone knew either Senate Repubs would filibuster or House Repubs would not consider a Dem Senate bill, or both. Thus, I suspect that as striking as that chart is, if you did the same analysis with percentages of governing bills, the chart would be even more dramatic and the obstruction even more evident. What you're looking at in recent years are just obstructions to the must-do-to-keep-government-going bills, and the chart probably has few if any bills that would make government better because of the chilling effect the Repub obstructionism has wrought.