Posted on 03/12/2019 6:57:06 PM PDT by BlackFemaleArmyColonel
WASHINGTON, DC – Senate Republicans are preparing to reinterpret Senate Rules in coming weeks to reduce the number of hours required to confirm presidential nominations, responding to Democrats’ unprecedented obstruction of President Trump’s nominees for both the judiciary and the Executive Branch.
Under Senate Rule XXII, debate on any matter can continue indefinitely. This is called a filibuster, when senators are deliberately continuing debate for the purpose of preventing a vote – unless three-fifths of senators (60) vote to break the filibuster by invoking cloture. Once cloture is invoked, further debate is limited to 30 additional hours, then a final vote must take place.
Rule XXII is designed to force debate on legislation. Historically it has generally not been used on presidential nominations. You can amend legislation, but a nomination is a simple yes-or-no proposition.
Article II of the Constitution specifies that all federal judges require Senate confirmation, as do senior positions in the administration. Currently, 1,200 positions out of 4,100 political appointments in a presidential administration are “principal officers” that are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Theoretically, the Senate could use its confirmation power to keep seats on the federal judiciary – including even the Supreme Court – open indefinitely. Senators could also employ it to hamstring a presidential administration by denying a vote to presidential nominees for key positions in the government.
In fact, that is what Senate Democrats are doing now. Judges are being slow-walked, with more cloture votes being required in two years for President Trump’s picks than all the judicial nominations of every previous president combined since the filibuster was created in the late 1800s. Similarly, hundreds of the 1,200 Senate-confirmed positions in the Trump administration are still vacant.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Damn, JUST GET TO IT. It should have been done in 5 minutes in January.
By the way, for you McConnell haters, read the article, it was him blocking it, it was your usual RINOs. Now that they have 53 votes, and some changed minds, they can actually pass this damn thing - and Mitch is PUSHING IT.
Yes, definitely finally. But I expect Mitch will take his sweet time “reinterpreting” the closure rule.
As a corollary, Lindsey Graham needs to “reinterpret” the withholding of a “Blue Slip” to mean the withholding Senator “disapproves” of the District Court nominee but that the withholding Senator does NOT have veto power over the nominee. The ‘RATS have abused this Blue Slip procedure repeatedly over the years to guilde the direction of the courts into a Leftist direction which disregards the US Constitution.
They’ve been saying this for a long time, never seems to happen
OMG. In the coming WEEKS.....?
Well we’ll see if it’s all talk or really action to the desired end. They seem to trip up their own feet in carrying through on what they tell us more often than not.
I get really annoyed any more with politicians and authors throwing out there the Constitution as if it’s icing on their cake. Our Constitution does not even mention political parties ....further members of the Government e.g. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen and all Government Officials and Government Employees are not members of the general public, they are ‘employees’ of “we the People”...
Constitution derives its power not from a king or a Congress, but from the people themselves. This concept of popular sovereignty—power to the people—is the foundation upon which the entire Consti-tution depends.
Congressional leaders use it like a seal of approval which they’ve distorted and abused to support their political points not the people!
Do you know what the search function is for?
About damn time
In coming weeks? Wasn’t this supposed to be weeks ago?
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