Free Republic

Subtitle: The solution to a dysfunctional Congress is not for Obama to govern the country all by himself. In the face of congressional gridlock, President Obama has started taking more and more matters into his own hands. In recent months, he has announced new gun control measures, put in place limited immigration reform and made fixes to the Affordable Care Act — all without Congress. Many liberals who once worried about presidential overreach have applauded his robust use of presidential power. Yet the president's increasing unilateralism shouldn't be cause for celebration. Bypassing Congress means bypassing democratic checks. It also means...

Hypocrisy about the nuclear option comes easily to today's Democrats.If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then calling Harry Reid, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden hypocrites for abandoning their previous “principled” defense of Senate filibusters is an insult to hypocrites. Hypocrites, after all, recognize the power of principles and try to squirm out of the vice of violating them, but today’s post-modern Democrats feel no shame in making contradictory “principled” arguments because they no longer pay any tribute whatsoever to the virtue of neutral, non-partisan principle.These Democrats are practicing the philosophy of post-modernism preached by liberal theorists...

Republicans and Democrats can debate which party has most abused the option, and which has been more hypocritical in changing its mind about the filibuster once it went from the majority to the minority or the reverse. Neither side has acted with selfless regard for the will of the people or the proper functioning of government. The change adopted by the Senate has been dubbed the "nuclear option," as though it were unimaginably destructive. But all it destroys is the capacity of the minority party to frustrate the operation of the legislative branch. And it applies only to executive and...

**SNIP** “Filibustering a sitting member of Congress for the first time in 150 years is an insult to a colleague and, in the case of Representative Mel Watt, is a hit in the gut to the African American community. Once a president is elected, he is entitled to his choice of executives to implement the policies he had promised to carry out if elected. Representative Watt, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a graduate of Yale Law School, had deep professional experience in housing as a practicing attorney before coming to...

What do you think about the use of filibuster in the US Senate? I like the filibuster as it has been used.The filibuster should be used in only certain situations.The filibuster is OK when my side uses it, but not OK when the other side uses it.The filibuster should be abolished.

For all the gnashing of teeth over the lack of comity and civility in Washington, the real problem is not etiquette but the breakdown of political norms, legislative and constitutional. Such as the one just spectacularly blown up in the Senate... The violence to political norms here consisted in how that change was executed. By brute force — a near party-line vote of 52 to 48 . This was a disgraceful violation of more than two centuries of precedent. If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today...

".......Reid clearly felt strongly about the [filibuster] when Democrats were the minority party in the Senate, and he insisted that as majority leader he would never target the filibuster. However, as the problems with the Obamacare rollout continue to mount, and the president barrels headlong into lame-duck territory amid plummeting poll numbers, Reid is invoking his “right to change how I feel about things.” As is the president, apparently. Reid’s change of heart dates back to October 2011, when he used the nuclear option to scale back the ability of the Republican minority to offer amendments, something he has effectively...

The Senate vote Thursday to curb the use of filibuster against judicial nominees, over the objections of the Republican minority, can only be seen as a terrifying development. Why, next thing you know we could be deciding all sorts of things by majority vote. The average American may think deciding things by majority vote is the basic idea of our democracy. But say something like that, and you risk getting a lecture on how America is not a democracy but a constitutional republic, and that the framers took care not to give too much power to the people, and that...

Congress is broken, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday before holding a party-line vote that disposed of rules that have guided and protected the chamber since 1789. Democrats were fully justified in stripping Republicans of their right to filibuster President Obama’s nominees — yet they will come to deeply regret what they have done. Reid’s remedy — calling a simple-majority vote to undo more than two centuries of custom — has created a situation in which the minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is expected to use the minority’s remaining powers to gum up the works, and to get...

There are a few Rules the House can change in retaliation for the questionable Senate rule change. 1. No more reconciliation committees. 2. Blue slip any legislation stripped and packed by the Senate under origination theory. 3. Cut Senate and House budget allowances for travel. 4. Basically start defunding the Senate. Anybody else?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev) move to eliminate the rule that required a 60-vote majority to end debate has “grievously irked” his GOP counterpart, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken). “Harry promised he would never use this so-called ‘nuclear option,’” McConnell complained. “When you put this together with the false promises of ‘if you like your insurance you can keep it’ that have been made by the president and virtually every Democrat over the past three years we see a pattern of deception that has destroyed the Government’s credibility. I’m fighting mad.” McConnell says he places most of the blame...

(CNN) - Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used an analogy about rape Friday to blast this week’s decision by the Senate's Democratic majority to change the chamber’s filibuster rules despite the unanimous opposition of minority Republicans. The so-called “nuclear option” will allow a bare majority of senators – as opposed to 60 - to approve most judicial and executive branch nominations. The Democratic caucus controls 55 of the chamber’s 100 seats. "Let's say, let's take 10 people in a room and they're a group. And the room is made up of six men and four women. The group...

Today's Democrats have grown up in the Saul Alinsky tradition, and on Thursday they proved it with a partisan vote to break the Senate filibuster rule for confirming judges and executive-branch nominees. The new rules will empower the party's liberals for as long as they control the White House and Senate, but they will also set a precedent for conservatives to exploit in the future. The immediate result of Harry Reid's power play will be that President Obama has a freer hand to pursue his agenda through regulation and the courts. Mr. Reid's new rules for Senate radicals are also...

There is one simple thing Republicans can do to retaliate. They can start by ending the Democrat super-majority on legislative issues. They can easily pledge to filibuster every piece of legislation and deny all requests for unanimous consent until the rules change is overturned. How would Harry Reid respond to a complete shutdown of the Senate? Would he abolish the filibuster even for legislation? Let him try. But for now, he has nothing to fear from just eliminating the filibuster on judges because he knows Republicans will not retaliate. Reid knows that there is not a single issue where McCain,...

The Senate vote Thursday to lower the barriers for presidential nominations should make it easier for President Obama to accomplish key second-term priorities, including tougher measures on climate change and financial regulation, that have faced intense opposition from Republicans in Congress. The move to allow a simple majority vote on most executive and judicial nominees also sets the stage for Obama to appoint new top officials to the Federal Reserve and other key agencies — probably leading to more aggressive action to stimulate the economy and housing market. And it frees Obama to make changes to his Cabinet without the...

Well. . . Harry Reid has gone nuclear. Yesterday the Senate, with cheerleading from Democrats in the House of Representatives and our honesty-deprived White House, passed a rule that would strip the minority party of its right to filibuster most Presidential nominees. The move itself (known as the “nuclear option”) usurps the Senate’s traditional eye toward minority rights, and dismantles the republican form of deliberation for which the Senate is known. The truly audacious part of the Senate Democrat’s power grab, however, was their blatant hypocrisy. After all, in 2005 they voted against this very rule change. Now don’t...

I realize there is not a whole lot we can do about the vote yesterday in the Senate regarding the rule change. However, I did call both of my senators from TN (Alexander and Corker) expressing my displeasure. Basically, I told them that this is what the appeasement from them (my two senators) has gotten us. The Dems want total control and inch by inch the GOP is giving it to them. I told both offices I would like to see some fight from them (I know, good luck!). I urge you to call your Senators and express your displeasure...

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) ripped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) on the floor Thursday for his hypocritical role in bringing about the “nuclear option,” quoting directly from a Washington Free Beacon article during his impassioned speech. Reid said in a 2008 interview that, so long as he was the party leader, there would not be a nuclear option effectively stripping the Republicans of their ability to block President Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees. However, on a near party-line vote Thursday, the Senate voted to approve the measure, 52-48. Reid previously called such attempts at a nuclear...

....Reid clinched support for changing the rules at the weekly Tuesday Senate Democratic caucus lunch. .....Reid, without mentioning the colleague’s name, told his caucus that one of its senior members who had long opposed filibuster reform, recently had a change of mind and privately urged him to trigger the controversial tactic. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) then rose before the room full of Democrats and identified herself as the recent convert. “She got up right afterward and said, ‘He was talking about me,’” said a Democratic senator..... Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not know if he had the votes...

"...As Majority Leader Harry Reid orchestrated the change in the rules governing executive nominations and lower-court appointments, his opponents cried tyranny, though they also promised that when they took power they would go further, applying the new standard to Supreme Court nominations. In other words, tyranny—but we promise we'll give you more of it. The new rules fit with that kind of Senate. ...Whoever is ultimately at fault for the rule change—the Democrats who forced it or the Republicans who blocked the nominations requiring the new rules—the result is that the minority will have less power. That means elections will...